Fine-Grained Categorization for 3D Scene Understanding

Fine-grained categorization of object classes is receiving increased attention, since it promises to automate classification tasks that are difficult even for humans, such as the distinction between different animal species. In this paper, we consider fine-grained categorization for a different reason: following the intuition that fine-grained categories encode metric information, we aim to generate metric constraints from fine-grained category predictions, for the benefit of 3D scene-understanding. To that end, we propose two novel methods for fine-grained classification, both based on part information, as well as a new fine-grained category data set of car types. We demonstrate superior performance of our methods to state-of-the-art classifiers, and show first promising results for estimating the depth of objects from fine-grained category predictions from a monocular camera.