More Like this

1. Joint Commonsense and Relation Reasoning for Image and Video Captioning

   Hou, J ; Wu, X ; Jia, Y ; Luo, J. ( February 2020 , Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence)

   Exploiting relationships between objects for image and video captioning has received increasing attention. Most existing methods depend heavily on pre-trained detectors of objects and their relationships, and thus may not work well when facing detection challenges such as heavy occlusion, tiny-size objects, and long-tail classes. In this paper, we propose a joint commonsense and relation reasoning method that exploits prior knowledge for image and video captioning without relying on any detectors. The prior knowledge provides semantic correlations and constraints between objects, serving as guidance to build semantic graphs that summarize object relationships, some of which cannot be directly perceived frommore »images or videos. Particularly, our method is implemented by an iterative learning algorithm that alternates between 1) commonsense reasoning for embedding visual regions into the semantic space to build a semantic graph and 2) relation reasoning for encoding semantic graphs to generate sentences. Experiments on several benchmark datasets validate the effectiveness of our prior knowledge-based approach.« less
2. MultiCLU: Multi-stage Context Learning and Utilization for Storefront Accessibility Detection and Evaluation

   https://doi.org/10.1145/3512527.3531361  

   Wang, Xuan ; Chen, Jiajun ; Tang, Hao ; Zhu, Zhigang ( June 2022 , ICMR '22: Proceedings of the 2022 International Conference on Multimedia Retrieval)

   In this work, a storefront accessibility image dataset is collected from Google street view and is labeled with three main objects for storefront accessibility: doors (for store entrances), doorknobs (for accessing the entrances) and stairs (for leading to the entrances). Then MultiCLU, a new multi-stage context learning and utilization approach, is proposed with the following four stages: Context in Labeling (CIL), Context in Training (CIT), Context in Detection (CID) and Context in Evaluation (CIE). The CIL stage automatically extends the label for each knob to include more local contextual information. In the CIT stage, a deep learning method is usedmore »to project the visual information extracted by a Faster R-CNN based object detector to semantic space generated by a Graph Convolutional Network. The CID stage uses the spatial relation reasoning between categories to refine the confidence score. Finally in the CIE stage, a new loose evaluation metric for storefront accessibility, especially for knob category, is proposed to efficiently help BLV users to find estimated knob locations. Our experiment results show that the proposed MultiCLU framework can achieve significantly better performance than the baseline detector using Faster R-CNN, with +13.4% on mAP and +15.8% on recall, respectively. Our new evaluation metric also introduces a new way to evaluate storefront accessibility objects, which could benefit BLV group in real life.« less
3. Detecting Out-Of-Context Objects Using Graph Context Reasoning Network

   Acharya, M ; Roy, A ; Koneripalli, K ; Jha, S ; Kanan, C ; Divakaran, A ( July 2022 , IJCAI)

   This paper presents an approach to detect out-of-context (OOC) objects in an image. Given an image with a set of objects, our goal is to determine if an object is inconsistent with the scene context and detect the OOC object with a bounding box. In this work, we consider commonly explored contextual relations such as co-occurrence relations, the relative size of an object with respect to other objects, and the position of the object in the scene. We posit that contextual cues are useful to determine object labels for in-context objects and inconsistent context cues are detrimental to determining objectmore »labels for out-of-context objects. To realize this hypothesis, we propose a graph contextual reasoning network (GCRN) to detect OOC objects. GCRN consists of two separate graphs to predict object labels based on the contextual cues in the image: 1) a representation graph to learn object features based on the neighboring objects and 2) a context graph to explicitly capture contextual cues from the neighboring objects. GCRN explicitly captures the contextual cues to improve the detection of in-context objects and identify objects that violate contextual relations. In order to evaluate our approach, we create a large-scale dataset by adding OOC object instances to the COCO images. We also evaluate on recent OCD benchmark. Our results show that GCRN outperforms competitive baselines in detecting OOC objects and correctly detecting in-context objects.« less
4. Forecasting Action through Contact Representations from First Person Video

   https://doi.org/10.1109/TPAMI.2021.3055233  

   Dessalene, Eadom ; Devaraj, Chinmaya ; Maynord, Michael ; Fermuller, Cornelia ; Aloimonos, Yiannis ( December 2020 , IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence)

   Human visual understanding of action is reliant on anticipation of contact as is demonstrated by pioneering work in cognitive science. Taking inspiration from this, we introduce representations and models centered on contact, which we then use in action prediction and anticipation. We annotate a subset of the EPIC Kitchens dataset to include time-to-contact between hands and objects, as well as segmentations of hands and objects. Using these annotations we train the Anticipation Module, a module producing Contact Anticipation Maps and Next Active Object Segmentations - novel low-level representations providing temporal and spatial characteristics of anticipated near future action. On topmore »of the Anticipation Module we apply Egocentric Object Manipulation Graphs (Ego-OMG), a framework for action anticipation and prediction. Ego-OMG models longer-term temporal semantic relations through the use of a graph modeling transitions between contact delineated action states. Use of the Anticipation Module within Ego-OMG produces state-of-the-art results, achieving 1st and 2nd place on the unseen and seen test sets, respectively, of the EPIC Kitchens Action Anticipation Challenge, and achieving state-of-the-art results on the tasks of action anticipation and action prediction over EPIC Kitchens. We perform ablation studies over characteristics of the Anticipation Module to evaluate their utility.« less
5. Unsupervised Feature Learning for Point Cloud by Contrasting and Clustering with Graph Convolutional Neural Network

   Zhang, Ling ; Zhu, Zhigang ( June 2019 , CVPR Workshop on 3D Scene Understanding for Vision, Graphics, and Robotics)

   To alleviate the cost of collecting and annotating large- scale point cloud datasets for 3D scene understanding tasks, we propose an unsupervised learning approach to learn features from unlabeled point cloud ”3D object” dataset by using part contrasting and object clustering with deep graph neural networks (GNNs). In the contrast learn- ing step, all the samples in the 3D object dataset are cut into two parts and put into a ”part” dataset. Then a contrast learning GNN (ContrastNet) is trained to verify whether two randomly sampled parts from the part dataset belong to the same object. In the cluster learningmore »step, the trained ContrastNet is applied to all the samples in the original 3D object dataset to extract features, which are used to group the samples into clusters. Then another GNN for cluster- ing learning (ClusterNet) is trained to predict the cluster IDs of all the training samples. The contrasting learning forces the ContrastNet to learn high-level semantic features of objects but probably ignores low-level features, while the ClusterNet improves the quality of learned features by be- ing trained to discover objects that belong to the same se- mantic categories by using cluster IDs. We have conducted extensive experiments to evaluate the proposed framework on point cloud classification tasks. The proposed unsupervised learning approach obtained comparable performance to the state-of-the-art unsupervised learning methods that used much more complicated network structures. The code and an extended version of this work is publicly available via: https://github.com/lingzhang1/ContrastNet« less