Is Hog descriptors constructed in peopledetect.cpp?

Question

I am new to hog, I am using opencv2.4.4 and visual studio 2010, i am running the sample peopledetect.cpp in the package and its compiling and running, but i want to understand the the source code in detail.In peopledetect.cpp is hog descriptors constructed/ already trained for peopledetection 3780 vectors are fed into svm classifier? when i try to debug the peopledetect.cpp i could only find HOGDescriptor creates hog descriptor and detector, i basically doesnt understand what this API does HOGDescriptor as i see peopledetect.cpp doesnt go through the steps of hog processing, it loads the already trained vectors to svm classifier to detect people/no people, am i wrong?. As there is no documentation about this.

Can anyone please brief about this.

Answer 1

Coming to more clearer answer, peopledetect.cpp goes through all the hog steps. digging deeper i was more clear. Basically if you debug peopledetect.cpp goes through these steps.

Initially image is divided into several scales, scale0(1.05) is coefficient for detection window increase. For each scale of the image features are extracted from window and a classifier window is run, like above it follows scale-space pyramid method. So its pretty big computational process, very expensive, so opencv team has tried to parallelise for each scale. I was baffled before why i was not able to debug/go through the steps, This parallel_for_(Range(0, (int)levelScale.size()),HOGInvoker()) creates several threads where each thread works on each scale, depends how much threads or created something like this. because of this i was not able to debug, what i did was freeze all the threads and debug only the main thread. for different scales of the image hog processing steps are

Here in peopledetect.cpp hog and classifier window are kinda combined.In a single window(64x128) both feature extraction and running classifier takes place. After this is done for each scale of the image. There are a number of pedestrian windows of different scales are often associated with this region, this is grouped using grouprectangle() function

Answer 2

Training SVM consist to find parameters of the max margin between postive and negative samples.

if the same feature extraction is done for 1000+ negative and positive sample there is must be millions of features rite?

Yes. These coefficient are extracted from training databases. You don't have them. SVM stores only support vectors which are sufficient to characterise the margin. See dual form of linear SVM for example.

a number of pedestrian windows of different scales are often associated with the region

True. A merging function is apply. Different methods (such groupRectangles(..)) are available (see here) and take in arguments parameters given to detectMultiScale(..).

Answer 3

What i understood from different papers is that feature extraction using hog is done using several positive and negative images, these features which were extracted is fed to Linear SVM to train them,So peopledetect.cpp uses this trained linear SVM sample, so This feature extraction process is not done by peopledetect.cpp i.e HOGDescriptor::getDefaultPeopleDetector() consists of coefficients of the classifier trained for people detection. The features extracted from hog detection/window(64x128)gives a total of length 3780(4 cells x 9 bins x 7 x 15 blocks = 3780) features. These features are then used to train a linear SVM classifier. If the same feature extraction is done for 1000+ negative and positive sample there is must be millions of features rite? How do we get these co-efficients?

But The HOG descriptors are known to contain redundant information because of the different detection window sizes being used. So when the SVM classifier classifies a region as “pedestrian”, a number of pedestrian windows of different scales are often associated with the region. what peopledetect.cpp mainly does is (hog.detectMultiScale(img, found, 0, Size(8,8), Size(32,32), 1.05, 2);) The detection window is scanned across the image at all positions and scales, and conventional non-maximum suppression is run on the output pyramid to detect object instances.

Answer 4

The implementation of People Detection algorithm in opencv is based on HOG descriptors as features and SVM as classifier.

1. A training database (positives samples as person, negatives samples as non-person) is used to learn to SVM parameters (it computes and store the support vectors). Cross-validation is also perform (I assume) to optimize the soft margin parameter C and the kernel parameters (it could be linear kernel).

2. To detect people on testing video data, peopledetect.cpp loads the pre-learnt SVM, computes the HOG descriptors on different positions and scales, then merges the windows with high detection scores (outputs of binary SVM classifer).

Here is a good paper (inria) to start with.