Integral Histogram: A Fast Way to Extract Histograms in Cartesian Spaces Fatih Porikli Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories fatih@merl.com Abstract We present a novel method, which we refer as an integral histogram, to compute the histograms of all possible target regions in a Cartesian data space. Our method has three distinct advantages: 1- It is computationally superior to the conventional approach. The integral histogram method makes it possible to employ even an exhaustive search pro- cess in real-time, which was impractical before. 2- It can be extended to higher data dimensions, uniform and non- uniform bin formations, and multiple target scales with- out sacrificing its computational advantages. 3- It enables the description of higher level histogram features. We ex- ploit the spatial arrangement of data points, and recursively propagate an aggregated histogram by starting from the ori- gin and traversing through the remaining points along ei- ther a sca
