"We still don't know what a "part" is, but that philosophical sticking point didn't stop this paper from making a big impact in object category detection."
That's what computer science professor Serge Belongie said about paper #9 in the Serge Belongie list of all-time Top 10 IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence (TPAMI) papers. (This is part of an on-going TPAMI 30th anniversary celebration organized by the IEEE Computer Society’s Publishing Services Department .)
Serge's paper # 9...in case you were not sure based on his description is: "Learning to Detect Objects in Images via a Sparse, Part-Based Representation by Shivani Agarwal, Aatif Awan, and Dan Roth," IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, vol. 26, no. 11, pp. 1475-1490, Nov. 2004, doi:10.1109/TPAMI.2004.108