Combination features and models for human detection

This paper presents effective combination models with certain combination features for human detection. In the past several years, many existing features/models have achieved impressive progress, but their performances are still limited by the biases rooted in their self-structures, that is, a particular kind of feature/model may work well for some types of human bodies, but not for all the types. To tackle this difficult problem, we combine certain complementary features/models together with effective organization/fusion methods. Specifically, the HOG features, color features and bar-shape features are combined together with a cell-based histogram structure to form the so-called HOG-III features. Moreover, the detections from different models are fused together with the new proposed weighted-NMS algorithm, which enhances the probable “true” activations as well as suppresses the overlapped detections. The experiments on PASCAL VOC datasets demonstrate that, both the HOG-III features and the weighted-NMS fusion algorithm are effective (obvious improvement for detection performance) and efficient (relatively less computation cost): When applied to human detection task with the Grammar model and Poselet model, they can boost the detection performance significantly; Also, when extended to detection of the whole VOC 20 object categories with the deformable part-based model and deep CNN-based model, they still show competitive improvements.