text: We describe a method for performing active localization of objects in instances of visual situations. A visual situation is an abstract concept---e.g., "a boxing match", "a birthday party", "walking the dog", "waiting for a bus"---whose image instantiations are linked more by their common spatial and semantic structure than by low-level visual similarity. Our system combines given and learned knowledge of the structure of a particular situation, and adapts that knowledge to a new situation instance as it actively searches for objects. More specifically, the system learns a set of probability distributions describing spatial and other relationships among relevant objects. The system uses those distributions to iteratively sample object proposals on a test image, but also continually uses information from those object proposals to adaptively modify the distributions based on what the system has detected. We test our approach's ability to efficiently localize objects, using a situation-specific image dataset created by our group. We compare the results with several baselines and variations on our method, and demonstrate the strong benefit of using situation knowledge and active context-driven localization. Finally, we contrast our method with several other approaches that use context as well as active search for object localization in images.
  @cite_47: A scene category imposes tight distributions over the kind of objects that might appear in the scene, the appearance of those objects and their layout. In this paper, we propose a method to learn scene structures that can encode three main interlacing components of a scene: the scene category, the context-specific appearance of objects, and their layout. Our experimental evaluations show that our learned scene structures outperform state-of-the-art method of Deformable Part Models in detecting objects in a scene. Our scene structure provides a level of scene understanding that is amenable to deep visual inferences. The scene structures can also generate features that can later be used for scene categorization. Using these features, we also show promising results on scene categorization.
  @cite_28: 
  @cite_44: Multi-class image segmentation has made significant advances in recent years through the combination of local and global features. One important type of global feature is that of inter-class spatial relationships. For example, identifying "tree" pixels indicates that pixels above and to the sides are more likely to be "sky" whereas pixels below are more likely to be "grass." Incorporating such global information across the entire image and between all classes is a computational challenge as it is image-dependent, and hence, cannot be precomputed. In this work we propose a method for capturing global information from inter-class spatial relationships and encoding it as a local feature. We employ a two-stage classification process to label all image pixels. First, we generate predictions which are used to compute a local relative location feature from learned relative location maps. In the second stage, we combine this with appearance-based features to provide a final segmentation. We compare our results to recent published results on several multi-class image segmentation databases and show that the incorporation of relative location information allows us to significantly outperform the current state-of-the-art.
  @cite_24: In this paper, we propose an approach that exploits object segmentation in order to improve the accuracy of object detection. We frame the problem as inference in a Markov Random Field, in which each detection hypothesis scores object appearance as well as contextual information using Convolutional Neural Networks, and allows the hypothesis to choose and score a segment out of a large pool of accurate object segmentation proposals. This enables the detector to incorporate additional evidence when it is available and thus results in more accurate detections. Our experiments show an improvement of 4.1 in mAP over the R-CNN baseline on PASCAL VOC 2010, and 3.4 over the current state-of-the-art, demonstrating the power of our approach.
  @cite_45: While navigating in an environment, a vision system has to be able to recognize where it is and what the main objects in the scene are. We present a context-based vision system for place and object recognition. The goal is to identify familiar locations (e.g., office 610, conference room 941, main street), to categorize new environments (office, corridor, street) and to use that information to provide contextual priors for object recognition (e.g., tables are more likely in an office than a street). We present a low-dimensional global image representation that provides relevant information for place recognition and categorization, and show how such contextual information introduces strong priors that simplify object recognition. We have trained the system to recognize over 60 locations (indoors and outdoors) and to suggest the presence and locations of more than 20 different object types. The algorithm has been integrated into a mobile system that provides realtime feedback to the user.
  @cite_46: The sliding window approach of detecting rigid objects (such as cars) is predicated on the belief that the object can be identified from the appearance in a small region around the object. Other types of objects of amorphous spatial extent (e.g., trees, sky), however, are more naturally classified based on texture or color. In this paper, we seek to combine recognition of these two types of objects into a system that leverages "context" toward improving detection. In particular, we cluster image regions based on their ability to serve as context for the detection of objects. Rather than providing an explicit training set with region labels, our method automatically groups regions based on both their appearance and their relationships to the detections in the image. We show that our things and stuff (TAS) context model produces meaningful clusters that are readily interpretable, and helps improve our detection ability over state-of-the-art detectors. We also present a method for learning the active set of relationships for a particular dataset. We present results on object detection in images from the PASCAL VOC 2005 2006 datasets and on the task of overhead car detection in satellite images, demonstrating significant improvements over state-of-the-art detectors.
  @cite_10: Humans use visual context to improve object recognition. Yet, many machine vision algorithms still focus on local object features, discarding surrounding features as unwanted clutter. Here we study the impact of learning contextual cues while training an object classifier. In a new image database with 10 object categories and 28,800 images, objects were presented in contextual or uniform backgrounds. Both the fraction of contextual backgrounds during training and the spatial extent of context were analysed. Local object features and broader context features were extracted by two biologically inspired algorithms, previously used for object and scene classification, respectively: HMAX, applied to a tight window around every object, and a “Gist” algorithm, applied to a larger yet still localized window. The descriptors from both algorithms were combined and processed by a Support Vector Machine. The recognition rate increased from 29 , without contextual cues, to 43 for objects presented in their context.
  @cite_11: In this paper we study the role of context in existing state-of-the-art detection and segmentation approaches. Towards this goal, we label every pixel of PASCAL VOC 2010 detection challenge with a semantic category. We believe this data will provide plenty of challenges to the community, as it contains 520 additional classes for semantic segmentation and object detection. Our analysis shows that nearest neighbor based approaches perform poorly on semantic segmentation of contextual classes, showing the variability of PASCAL imagery. Furthermore, improvements of exist ing contextual models for detection is rather modest. In order to push forward the performance in this difficult scenario, we propose a novel deformable part-based model, which exploits both local context around each candidate detection as well as global context at the level of the scene. We show that this contextual reasoning significantly helps in detecting objects at all scales.
summary: Other approaches use Gist'' and other global image features to relate overall scene statistics or categories to object locations, sometimes combining these features with co-occurrence statistics and spatial relationships between objects (e.g., @cite_10 @cite_11 @cite_28 @cite_45 ). Still other methods learn statistical relationships between objects and features of pixel regions that surround the objects (e.g., @cite_44 @cite_24 ) or objects ( things'') and homogeneous image regions ( stuff'') @cite_46 . Going further, @cite_47 describes a method for learning joint distributions over scene categories (e.g., street,'' office,'' kitchen'') and context-specific appearance and layout of objects in those scenes.