Extended Support Vector Machines for Object Detection and Localization

Object detection is a fundamental task for many high-level computer vision applications such as image retrieval, scene understanding, activity recognition, visual surveillance and many others. Although object detection is one of the most popular problems in computer vision and various algorithms have been proposed thus far, it is also notoriously difficult, mainly due to lack of proper models for object representation, that handle large variations of object structure and appearance. In this article, we review a branch of object detection algorithms based on Support Vector Machines (SVMs), a well-known max-margin technique to minimize classification error. We introduce a few variations of SVMs-Structural SVMs and Latent SVMs-and discuss their applications to object detection and localization.