Higher-order dependencies in local appearance models

We propose a novel local appearance modeling method for object detection and recognition in cluttered scenes. The approach is based on the joint distribution of local feature vectors at multiple salient points and factorization with Independent Component Analysis (ICA). The resulting densities are simple multiplicative distributions modeled through adaptative Gaussian mixture models. This leads to computationally tractable joint probability densities which can model high-order dependencies. Our techinque has been initially tested under different natural and cluttered scenes with different degrees of occlusions with promising results. With this present work, we provide a large statistical test with the MNIST digit database in order to demonstrate the improved performance obtained by explicit modeling of high-order dependencies. International Conference on Image Processing (ICIP0́3) This work may not be copied or reproduced in whole or in part for any commercial purpose. Permission to copy in whole or in part without payment of fee is granted for nonprofit educational and research purposes provided that all such whole or partial copies include the following: a notice that such copying is by permission of Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories, Inc.; an acknowledgment of the authors and individual contributions to the work; and all applicable portions of the copyright notice. Copying, reproduction, or republishing for any other purpose shall require a license with payment of fee to Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories, Inc. All