Pose Estimation of Object Categories in Videos Using Linear Programming

In this paper we propose a method to consistently recover the pose of an object from a known class in a video sequence. As individual poses estimated from monocular images are rather noisy, we optimally aggregate pose evidence over all video frames. We construct a graph where nodes are values sampled from the pose posterior distributions computed by a continuous pose estimator in each frame of the sequence. We then find the globally optimum pose path through the graph that best explains the pose evidence for the whole sequence. As a result, we recover the correct object orientation at each frame even if single-frame pose evidence is sometimes inaccurate. We evaluate our approach on two publicly available car datasets, which encompass busy street scenarios and car races with significant changes in car orientation, blur and occlusions. We show that our method outperforms state-of-the-art approaches reducing the error by 40% on the challenging KITTI dataset.