As objects are inherently 3D, they have been modeled in 3D in the early days of computer vision. Due to the ambiguities arising from mapping 2D features to 3D models, 3D object representations have been neglected and 2D feature-based models are the predominant paradigm in object detection nowadays. While such models have achieved outstanding bounding box detection performance, they come with limited expressiveness, as they are clearly limited in their capability of reasoning about 3D shape or viewpoints. In this work, we bring the worlds of 3D and 2D object representations closer, by building an object detector which leverages the expressive power of 3D object representations while at the same time can be robustly matched to image evidence. To that end, we gradually extend the successful deformable part model [1] to include viewpoint information and part-level 3D geometry information, resulting in several different models with different level of expressiveness. We end up with a 3D object model, consisting of multiple object parts represented in 3D and a continuous appearance model. We experimentally verify that our models, while providing richer object hypotheses than the 2D object models, provide consistently better joint object localization and viewpoint estimation than the state-of-the-art multi-view and 3D object detectors on various benchmarks (KITTI [2] , 3D object classes [3] , Pascal3D+ [4] , Pascal VOC 2007 [5] , EPFL multi-view cars[6] ).

Despite the success of recent object class recognition systems, the long-standing problem of partial occlusion remains a major challenge, and a principled solution is yet to be found. In this paper we leave the beaten path of methods that treat occlusion as just another source of noise - instead, we include the occluder itself into the modelling, by mining distinctive, reoccurring occlusion patterns from annotated training data. These patterns are then used as training data for dedicated detectors of varying sophistication. In particular, we evaluate and compare models that range from standard object class detectors to hierarchical, part-based representations of occluder/occludee pairs. In an extensive evaluation we derive insights that can aid further developments in tackling the occlusion challenge.

Fine-grained categorization of object classes is receiving increased attention, since it promises to automate classification tasks that are difficult even for humans, such as the distinction between different animal species. In this paper, we consider fine-grained categorization for a different reason: following the intuition that fine-grained categories encode metric information, we aim to generate metric constraints from fine-grained cate-gory predictions, for the benefit of 3D scene-understanding. To that end, we propose two novel methods for fine-grained classification, both based on part information, as well as a new fine-grained category data set of car types. We demonstrate superior performance of our methods to state-of-the-art classifiers, and show first promising results for estimating the depth of objects from fine-grained category predictions from a monocular camera. 1

Current object class recognition systems typically target 2D bounding box localization, encouraged by benchmark data sets, such as Pascal VOC. While this seems suitable for the detection of individual objects, higher-level applications such as 3D scene understanding or 3D object tracking would benefit from more fine-grained object hypotheses incorporating 3D geometric information, such as viewpoints or the locations of individual parts. In this paper, we help narrowing the representational gap between the ideal input of a scene understanding system and object class detector output, by designing a detector particularly tailored towards 3D geometric reasoning. In particular, we extend the successful discriminatively trained deformable part models to include both estimates of viewpoint and 3D parts that are consistent across viewpoints. We experimentally verify that adding 3D geometric information comes at minimal performance loss w.r.t. 2D bounding box localization, but outperforms prior work in 3D viewpoint estimation and ultra-wide baseline matching.