text: Abstract The task of object viewpoint estimation has been a challenge since the early days of computer vision. To estimate the viewpoint (or pose) of an object, people have mostly looked at object intrinsic features, such as shape or appearance. Surprisingly, informative features provided by other, extrinsic elements in the scene, have so far mostly been ignored. At the same time, contextual cues have been proven to be of great benefit for related tasks such as object detection or action recognition. In this paper, we explore how information from other objects in the scene can be exploited for viewpoint estimation. In particular, we look at object configurations by following a relational neighbor-based approach for reasoning about object relations. We show that, starting from noisy object detections and viewpoint estimates, exploiting the estimated viewpoint and location of other objects in the scene can lead to improved object viewpoint predictions. Experiments on the KITTI dataset demonstrate that object configurations can indeed be used as a complementary cue to appearance-based viewpoint estimation. Our analysis reveals that the proposed context-based method can improve object viewpoint estimation by reducing specific types of viewpoint estimation errors commonly made by methods that only consider local information. Moreover, considering contextual information produces superior performance in scenes where a high number of object instances occur. Finally, our results suggest that, following a cautious relational neighbor formulation brings improvements over its aggressive counterpart for the task of object viewpoint estimation.
  @cite_64: Message-passing algorithms can solve a wide variety of optimization, inference, and constraint satisfaction problems. The algorithms operate on factor graphs that visually represent and specify the structure of the problems. After describing some of their applications, I survey the family of belief propagation (BP) algorithms, beginning with a detailed description of the min-sum algorithm and its exactness on tree factor graphs, and then turning to a variety of more sophisticated BP algorithms, including free-energy based BP algorithms, “splitting” BP algorithms that generalize “tree-reweighted” BP, and the various BP algorithms that have been proposed to deal with problems with continuous variables.
summary: To some extent, the proposed method bears some resemblance to the message-passing algorithms @cite_64 commonly used for inference in graphical models. In the same fashion as the message-passing algorithms, we start from input elements for which information is available, in this case the objects that define the nodes in the graph. Then, we iteratively select a target node, in our case each of the object hypotheses to be re-estimated, and each of the neighboring nodes (objects) casts a vote (or sends a message) indicating the level of agreement they have with the target node taking a specific state. Furthermore, similar to message-passing algorithms, for the case of loopy graphs the proposed method aims at providing an approximate solution to the problem at a relative low computation time. Different from message-passing algorithms, which operate over a graph defined over two types of nodes (variable nodes and check nodes), our method only considers variable nodes.