Car Make and Model recognition combining global and local cues

This paper addresses the problem of Car Make and Model recognition as an example of within-category object class recognition. In this problem, it is assumed that the general category of the object is given and the goal is to recognize the object class within the same category. As compared to general object recognition, this problem is more challenging because the variations among classes within the same category are subtle, mostly dominated by the category overall characteristics, and easily missed due to pose and illumination variations. Therefore, this specific problem may not be effectively addressed using generic object recognition approaches. In this paper, we propose a new approach to address this specific problem by combining global and local information and utilizing discriminative information labeled by a human expert. We validate our approach through experiments on recognizing the make and model of sedan cars from single view images.