Object detection versus object recognition

Before we proceed, we need to understand what we are going to discuss in this chapter. You must have frequently heard the terms object detection and object recognition, and they are often mistaken to be the same thing. There is a very distinct difference between the two.

Object detection refers to detecting the presence of a particular object in a given scene. We don't know what the object might be. For instance, we discussed face detection in Chapter 4, Detecting and Tracking Different Body Parts. During the discussion, we only detected whether or not a face was present in the given image. We didn't recognize the person! The reason we didn't recognize the person is because we didn't care about that in our discussion. Our goal was to find the location of the face in the given image. Commercial face recognition systems employ both face detection and face recognition to identify a person. First, we need to locate the face, and then run the face recognizer...