Now, what I have been doing is putting bounding boxes around the elephants in my positive training images. Then, collecting the xy coords for these in files, which I passed to python, which would cut-out the regions of interest that contained elephants, before passing them to the HOG feature extractor. The problem is the bounding boxes contained other bits of non-elephant things in some cases. Well, they'd always contain grass, sky, rocks, branches, etc.

So, I thought, why not cut-out the elephants accurately myself. And just pass these straight to the HOG feature extractor? E.g. cut-out like this:

THAT WAS A DISASTER AND I WASTED 2.5HRS CUTTING OUT ELEPHANTS!!!