Maximum Margin Correlation Filter: A New Approach for Localization and Classification

Support vector machine (SVM) classifiers are popular in many computer vision tasks. In most of them, the SVM classifier assumes that the object to be classified is centered in the query image, which might not always be valid, e.g., when locating and classifying a particular class of vehicles in a large scene. In this paper, we introduce a new classifier called Maximum Margin Correlation Filter (MMCF), which, while exhibiting the good generalization capabilities of SVM classifiers, is also capable of localizing objects of interest, thereby avoiding the need for image centering as is usually required in SVM classifiers. In other words, MMCF can simultaneously localize and classify objects of interest. We test the efficacy of the proposed classifier on three different tasks: vehicle recognition, eye localization, and face classification. We demonstrate that MMCF outperforms SVM classifiers as well as well known correlation filters.