Hough voting methods efficiently handle the high complexity of multiscale,
category-level object detection in cluttered scenes. The primary weakness
of this approach is however that mutually dependent local observations are independently
voting for intrinsically global object properties such as object scale.
All the votes are added up to obtain object hypotheses. The assumption is thus
that object hypotheses are a sum of independent part votes. Popular representation
schemes are, however, based on an overlapping sampling of semi-local
image features with large spatial support (e.g. SIFT or geometric blur). Features
are thus mutually dependent and we incorporate these dependences into probabilistic
Hough voting by presenting an objective function that combines three
intimately related problems: i) grouping of mutually dependent parts, ii) solving
the correspondence problem conjointly for dependent parts, and iii) finding concerted
object hypotheses using extended groups rath...