Asking for optimizing part of a hog-based object detection using C++

Since Matlab implementation of HOG+SVM object detection algorithm was too slow, I decided to make use of the speed of C++ and re-implemented the algorithm in it. However, I'm more or less unfamiliar with this powerful programming language.

Anyway, at the first stage I'm going to extract the features from a set of images, each of which is of size 40*40 pixels. These images are cropped from a larger image (which I call it the base image) through a for-loop. This loop is very fast in Matlab, and I expected it to be much faster in C++, but it is too slow and takes 30 seconds to be finished.

The following code shows the part that is very slow and I would be grateful if you first tell me where I have made a mistake (why it is too slow), and then please make your suggestions to run this part as fast as possible.

  Mat img = imread("BaseImage.jpg");  // The base image 

  HOGDescriptor hog;
  vector<float> hogvect;
  vector<Point> locs;
  Mat features;
  vector<Mat> StoreFeatures;

    for (int i = 0; i < img.rows - 40; ++i)
        {
        for (int j = 0; j < img.cols - 40; ++j)
            {

                hog.cellSize = Size(2, 2);
                hog.blockSize = Size(2,2);
                hog.blockStride = Size(1, 1);
                hog.winSize = Size (40, 40);
                hog.compute(img(Rect(j, i, 40, 40)), hogvect, Size(4, 4), Size(0, 0), locs); // Here, at each loop, a 40 * 40 pixels image is cropped from the base image, and its features are extracted through HOG.

                features.create(hogvect.size(), 1, CV_32FC1);
                for (int c = 0; c < hogvect.size(); ++c)
                {
                    *features.ptr<float>(c) = hogvect.at(c);
                 }

                 StoringFeatures.push_back(features); // A vector to store the features

            }
        }

I'm using CV 3.0.

Edit:

There are two main reasons causing the slowness of the code:

1: The hog.compute function. 2: The following for-loop:

for (int c = 0; c < hogvect.size(); ++c)
     {
       *features.ptr<float>(c) = hogvect.at(c);
     }