Supervised learning and evaluation of KITTI's cars detector with DPM

This paper carries out a discussion on the supervised learning of a car detector built as a Discriminative Part-based Model (DPM) from images in the recently published KITTI benchmark suite as part of the object detection and orientation estimation challenge. We present a wide set of experiments and many hints on the different ways to supervise and enhance the well-known DPM on a challenging and naturalistic urban dataset as KITTI. The evaluation algorithm and metrics, the selection of a clean but representative subset of training samples and the DPM tuning are key factors to learn an object detector in a supervised fashion. We provide evidence of subtle differences in performance depending on these aspects. Besides, the generalization of the trained models to an independent dataset is validated by 5-fold cross-validation.