Bitvectors for Robust Hierarchical Template Matching

Abstract

Many target detection problems involve objects where the primary variability in appearance is due to changes amongst characteristic configurations (as opposed to the systematic variability of object rotation or illumination changes). It is then important to utilise as much of the correlation between features as possible. Detecting pedestrians is such a problem and was tackled by Gavrila [Gav98] using a large set of exemplar templates combined with hierarchical matching via Distance Transforms. We describe a variant using a robust distance function and explicit allowance for occlusions. Our innovation is using bitwise logical operators to test against multiple exemplars in parallel.