Extended Histogram of Gradients feature for human detection

Unsigned Histogram of Gradients (UHoG) is a popular feature used for human detection. Despite its superior performance as reported in recent literature, an inherent limitation of UHoG is that gradients of opposite directions in a cell are mapped into the same histogram bin. This is undesirable as it will produce the same UHoG feature for two different patterns. To address this problem, we propose a new feature named the Extended Histogram of Gradients (ExHoG) in this paper. It comprises two components: UHoG and a histogram of absolute bin value differences of opposite gradient directions computed from Histogram of Gradients (HoG). Our experimental results show that the proposed ExHoG consistently outperforms the standard HoG and UHoG for human detection.