Understanding HoG output

[bricklemacho]

Hi, new to group, new to image processing starting to explore HoG.
Looking for a python implementation and discovered
skimage.feature.hog().

My plan to run skimage.features.hog over some positive/negative images
and use this to train a svm classifier from scikits-learn.   I am
trying to understand the output hog before I proceed further.    When
I run skimag.feature.hog() it over a region of interest  it appears to
returns an array.  How do I interpret this array?  Is there a way to
reshape the array to see what it was like before it was flattened or
that doesn't make any sense?  Can I plot the descriptor returned in
any meaningful way?

Also when I choose to visualise the HoG often where I expected to see
vertical line dominate, say on the edge of builds, the line drawn
often appears to be more dominant at the 45 deg.  Is this expected as
the line drawn is really just the sum of all surrounding orientations
for the "cell"?

Thanks in advance,

Michael.
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