Background Filtering for Improving of Object Detection in Images

We propose a method for improving object recognition in street scene images by identifying and filtering out background aspects. We analyse the semantic relationships between foreground and background objects and use the information obtained to remove areas of the image that are misclassified as foreground objects. We show that such background filtering improves the performance of four traditional object recognition methods by over 40%. Our method is independent of the recognition algorithms used for individual objects, and can be extended to generic object recognition in other environments by adapting other object models.