We propose a novel probabilistic framework for learning
visual models of 3D object categories by combining appearance
information and geometric constraints. Objects are
represented as a coherent ensemble of parts that are consistent
under 3D viewpoint transformations. Each part is
a collection of salient image features. A generative framework
is used for learning a model that captures the relative
position of parts within each of the discretized viewpoints.
Contrary to most of the existing mixture of viewpoints models,
our model establishes explicit correspondences of parts
across different viewpoints of the object class. Given a new
image, detection and classification are achieved by determining
the position and viewpoint of the model that maximize
recognition scores of the candidate objects. Our approach
is among the first to propose a generative probabilistic
framework for 3D object categorization. We test our
algorithm on the detection task and the viewpoint classif...