Detecting objects and people using SVMs and histograms of oriented gradients

This recipe presents another machine learning method, the SVM, which can produce accurate 2-class classifiers from training data. They have been largely used to solve many computer vision problems. This time, classification is solved by using a mathematical formula that looks at the geometry of the problem in high-dimension spaces.

In addition, we will also present a new image representation that is often used in conjunction with SVMs to produce robust object detectors.

Getting ready

Images of objects are mainly characterized by their shape and textual content. This is the aspect that is captured by the Histogram of Oriented Gradients (HOG) representation...