This paper explores how to exploit shape information to perform object class recognition. We use a sparse part-based model to describe object categories defined by shape. The sparseness allows the relative spatial relationship between parts to be described simply. It is possible, with this model, to highlight potential locations of the object and its parts in novel images. Subsequently these areas are examined by a more flexible shape model that measures if the image data provides evidence of the existence of boundary/connecting curves between connected hypothesized parts. From these measurements it is possible to construct a very simple cost function which indicates the presence or absence of the object class. The part-based model is designed to decouple variations due to affine warps and other forms of shape deformations. The latter are modeled probabilistically using conditional probability distributions which describe the linear dependencies between the location of a part and a subset of the other parts. These conditional distributions can then be exploited to search efficiently for the instances of the part model in novel images. Results are reported on experiments performed on the ETHZ shape classes database that features heavily cluttered images and large variations in scale.
