Efficient matching of pictorial structures

A pictorial structure is a collection of parts arranged in a deformable configuration. Each part is represented using a simple appearance model and the deformable configuration is represented by spring-like connections between pairs of parts. While pictorial structures were introduced a number of years ago, they have not been broadly applied to matching and recognition problems. This has been due in part to the computational difficulty of matching pictorial structures to images. In this paper we present an efficient algorithm for finding the best global match of a pictorial stucture to an image. With this improved algorithm, pictorial structures provide a practical and powerful framework for quantitative descriptions of objects and scenes, and are suitable for many generic image recognition problems. We illustrate the approach using simple models of a person and a car