Interactiveness Field in Human-Object Interactions

Xinpeng Liu, Yong-Lu Li, Xiaoqian Wu, Yu-Wing Tai, Cewu Lu, Chi-Keung Tang; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2022, pp. 20113-20122

Human-Object Interaction (HOI) detection plays a core role in activity understanding. Though recent two/one-stage methods have achieved impressive results, as an essential step, discovering interactive human-object pairs remains challenging. Both one/two-stage methods fail to effectively extract interactive pairs instead of generating redundant negative pairs. In this work, we introduce a previously overlooked interactiveness bimodal prior: given an object in an image, after pairing it with the humans, the generated pairs are either mostly non-interactive, or mostly interactive, with the former more frequent than the latter. Based on this interactiveness bimodal prior we propose the "interactiveness field". To make the learned field compatible with real HOI image considerations, we propose new energy constraints based on the cardinality and difference in the inherent "interactiveness field" underlying interactive versus non-interactive pairs. Consequently, our method can detect more precise pairs and thus significantly boost HOI detection performance, which is validated on widely-used benchmarks where we achieve decent improvements overstate-of-the-arts. Our code will be made publicly available.