In this paper we present a statistical framework for modeling the appearance of objects. Our work is motivated by the pictorial structure models introduced by Fischler and Elschlager. The basic idea is to model an object by a collection of parts arranged in a deformable configuration. The appearance of each part is modeled separately, and the deformable configuration is represented by spring-like connections between pairs of parts. These models allow for qualitative descriptions of visual appearance, and are suitable for generic recognition problems. We use these models to address the problem of detecting an object in an image as well as the problem of learning an object model from training examples, and present efficient algorithms for both these problems. We demonstrate the techniques by learning models that represent faces and human bodies and using the resulting models to locate the corresponding objects in novel images.

This paper provides linear-time algorithms for solving a class of minimization problems in-volving a cost function with both local and spatial terms. These problems can be viewed as a generalization of classical distance transforms of binary images, where the binary image is replaced by an arbitrary sampled function. Alternatively they can be viewed in terms of the minimum convolution of two functions, which is an important operation in grayscale mor-phology. A useful consequence of our techniques is a simple, fast method for computing the Euclidean distance transform of a binary image. The methods are also applicable to Viterbi decoding, belief propagation and optimal control. 1