Pedestrian Recognition Using Second-Order HOG Feature

Abstract

Histogram of Oriented Gradients (HOG) is a well-known feature for pedestrian recognition which describes object appearance as local histograms of gradient orientation. However, it is incapable of describing higher-order properties of object appearance. In this paper we present a second-order HOG feature which attempts to capture second-order properties of object appearance by estimating the pairwise relationships among spatially neighbor components of HOG feature. In our preliminary experiments, we found that using harmonic-mean or min function to measure pairwise relationship gives satisfactory results. We demonstrate that the proposed second-order HOG feature can significantly improve the HOG feature on several pedestrian datasets, and it is also competitive to other second-order features including GLAC and CoHOG.