Interpretable Object Recognition by Semantic Prototype Analysis

Qiyang Wan, Ruiping Wang, Xilin Chen; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Winter Conference on Applications of Computer Vision (WACV), 2024, pp. 800-809

People can usually give reasons for recognizing a particular object as a specific category, using various means such as body language (by pointing out) and natural language (by telling). This inspires us to develop a recognition model with such principles to explain the recognition process to enhance human trust. We propose Semantic Prototype Analysis Network (SPANet), an interpretable object recognition approach that enables models to explicate the decision process more lucidly and comprehensibly to humans by "pointing out where to focus" and "telling about why it is" simultaneously. With the proposed method, some part prototypes with semantic concepts will be provided to elaborate on the classification together with a group of visualized samples to achieve both part-wise and semantic interpretability. The results of extensive experiments demonstrate that SPANet is able to recognize objects almost as well as the non-interpretable models, at the same time generating intelligible explanations for its decision process.