Accurate Object Detection with Joint Classification-Regression Random Forests

Samuel Schulter, Christian Leistner, Paul Wohlhart, Peter M. Roth, Horst Bischof; Proceedings of the IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2014, pp. 923-930

In this paper, we present a novel object detection approach that is capable of regressing the aspect ratio of objects. This results in accurately predicted bounding boxes having high overlap with the ground truth. In contrast to most recent works, we employ a Random Forest for learning a template-based model but exploit the nature of this learning algorithm to predict arbitrary output spaces. In this way, we can simultaneously predict the object probability of a window in a sliding window approach as well as regress its aspect ratio with a single model. Furthermore, we also exploit the additional information of the aspect ratio during the training of the Joint Classification-Regression Random Forest, resulting in better detection models. Our experiments demonstrate several benefits: (i) Our approach gives competitive results on standard detection benchmarks. (ii) The additional aspect ratio regression delivers more accurate bounding boxes than standard object detection approaches in terms of overlap with ground truth, especially when tightening the evaluation criterion. (iii) The detector itself becomes better by only including the aspect ratio information during training.