Subcategory Clustering with Latent Feature Alignment and Filtering for Object Detection

For objects with large appearance variations, it has been proved that their detection performance can be effectively improved by clustering positive training instances into subcategories and learning multi-component models for the subcategories. However, it is not trivial to generate subcategories of high quality, due to the difficulty in measuring the similarity between positive instances. In this letter we propose a new weakly supervised clustering method to achieve better sub-categorization. Our method provides a more precise measurement of the similarity by aligning the positive instances through latent variables and filtering the aligned features. As a better alternative to the initialization step of the latent-SVM algorithm for the learning of the multi-component models, our method can lead to a superior performance gain for object detection. We demonstrate this on various real-world datasets.