The histogram of oriented gradients (HOG) is a feature descriptor used in computer vision and image processing for the purpose of object detection. The technique counts occurrences of gradient orientation in localized portions of an image. This method is similar to that of edge orientation histograms, scale-invariant feature transform descriptors, and shape contexts, but differs in that it is computed on a dense grid of uniformly spaced cells and uses overlapping local contrast normalization for improved accuracy.
Navneet Dalal and Bill Triggs, researchers for the French National Institute for Research in Computer Science and Automation (INRIA), first described HOG descriptors at the 2005 Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR). In this work they focused on pedestrian detection in static images, although since then they expanded their tests to include human detection in videos, as well as to a variety of common animals and vehicles in static imagery.