Surface Based Object Detection in RGBD Images

International audienceViewpoint variation is one of the main challenges for object-detection frameworks. In this work we describe strategies to improve object detection pipelines by introducing viewpoint based mixture components. We learn accurate mixtures of object detectors for RGB-Depth (RGBD) data using the latent SVM framework. Our contributions are threefold. First, we use surface-based object representations (3D mesh models) from available 3D object model repositories to learn strongly supervised viewpoint classifiers. These are used to guide the first stages of model learning, and help avoid inaccurate local minima of latent SVM training. Second, we develop a geometric dataset augmentation scheme that uses scene geometry to 'take another look' at the training data, simulating the effect of camera viewpoint changes. Third, to better exploit depth information, we develop a novel depth-based dense feature extraction method that provides a robust statistical description of scene geometry. We evaluate our learned detectors on the NYU dataset, and demonstrate that each of our advances results in systematic performance improvements over the traditional HOG-based detection pipeline