Improving an Object Detector and Extracting Regions Using Superpixels

We propose an approach to improve the detection performance of a generic detector when it is applied to a particular video. The performance of offline-trained objects detectors are usually degraded in unconstrained video environments due to variant illuminations, backgrounds and camera viewpoints. Moreover, most object detectors are trained using Haar-like features or gradient features but ignore video specific features like consistent color patterns. In our approach, we apply a Superpixel-based Bag-of-Words (BoW) model to iteratively refine the output of a generic detector. Compared to other related work, our method builds a video-specific detector using superpixels, hence it can handle the problem of appearance variation. Most importantly, using Conditional Random Field (CRF) along with our super pixel-based BoW model, we develop and algorithm to segment the object from the background . Therefore our method generates an output of the exact object regions instead of the bounding boxes generated by most detectors. In general, our method takes detection bounding boxes of a generic detector as input and generates the detection output with higher average precision and precise object regions. The experiments on four recent datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach and significantly improves the state-of-art detector by 5-16% in average precision.