  The Histogram of Oriented Gradient (HOG) descriptor has led to many advances
in computer vision over the last decade and is still part of many state of the
art approaches. We realize that the associated feature computation is piecewise
differentiable and therefore many pipelines which build on HOG can be made
differentiable. This lends to advanced introspection as well as opportunities
for end-to-end optimization. We present our implementation of $\nabla$HOG based
on the auto-differentiation toolbox Chumpy and show applications to pre-image
visualization and pose estimation which extends the existing differentiable
renderer OpenDR pipeline. Both applications improve on the respective
state-of-the-art HOG approaches.
