Recognizing object classes and their 3D viewpoints is an
important problem in computer vision. Based on a partbased
probabilistic representation [31], we propose a new
3D object class model that is capable of recognizing unseen
views by pose estimation and synthesis. We achieve
this by using a dense, multiview representation of the viewing
sphere parameterized by a triangular mesh of viewpoints.
Each triangle of viewpoints can be morphed to synthesize
new viewpoints. By incorporating 3D geometrical
constraints, our model establishes explicit correspondences
among object parts across viewpoints. We propose an incremental
learning algorithm to train the generative model.
A cellphone video clip of an object is first used to initialize
model learning. Then the model is updated by a set of unsorted
training images without viewpoint labels. We demonstrate
the robustness of our model on object detection, viewpoint
classification and synthesis tasks. Our model performs
superio...