Continuous Pose Estimation with a Spatial Ensemble of Fisher Regressors

In this paper, we treat the problem of continuous pose estimation for object categories as a regression problem on the basis of only 2D training information. While regression is a natural framework for continuous problems, regression methods so far achieved inferior results with respect to 3D-based and 2D-based classification-and-refinement approaches. This may be attributed to their weakness to high intra-class variability as well as to noisy matching procedures and lack of geometrical constraints. We propose to apply regression to Fisher-encoded vectors computed from large cells by learning an array of Fisher regressors. Fisher encoding makes our algorithm flexible to variations in class appearance, while the array structure permits to indirectly introduce spatial context information in the approach. We formulate our problem as a MAP inference problem, where the likelihood function is composed of a generative term based on the prediction error generated by the ensemble of Fisher regressors as well as a discriminative term based on SVM classifiers. We test our algorithm on three publicly available datasets that envisage several difficulties, such as high intra-class variability, truncations, occlusions, and motion blur, obtaining state-of-the-art results.