An Effective Local Feature Descriptor for Object Detection in Real Scenes

In this study, we advocate the importance of robust local features that allow object form to be distinguished from other objects for detection purpose. We start from the grid of Histogram of oriented gradients (HOG) and integrate Scale Invariant Feature Transform (SIFT) within them. In HOG features an object's appearance is detected by the distribution of local intensity gradients or edge directions for different cells. In the proposed method we have computed the SIFT despite of computing intensity gradients for these cells. In this way, the proposed approach does not only provide more significant information than just providing intensity gradients but also proves to deal with following challenges: (i) scale invariance; (ii) rotation invariance; (iii) change in illumination; and (iv) change in view points. With qualitative and quantitative experimental evaluation on standard INRIA dataset, we have compared the proposed method with other state of the art object detection methods and demonstrated better performance over them.