Hallucinated Humans as the Hidden Context for Labeling 3D Scenes

Yun Jiang, Hema Koppula, Ashutosh Saxena; Proceedings of the IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2013, pp. 2993-3000

For scene understanding, one popular approach has been to model the object-object relationships. In this paper, we hypothesize that such relationships are only an artifact of certain hidden factors, such as humans. For example, the objects, monitor and keyboard, are strongly spatially correlated only because a human types on the keyboard while watching the monitor. Our goal is to learn this hidden human context (i.e., the human-object relationships), and also use it as a cue for labeling the scenes. We present Infinite Factored Topic Model (IFTM), where we consider a scene as being generated from two types of topics: human configurations and human-object relationships. This enables our algorithm to hallucinate the possible configurations of the humans in the scene parsimoniously. Given only a dataset of scenes containing objects but not humans, we show that our algorithm can recover the human object relationships. We then test our algorithm on the task of attribute and object labeling in 3D scenes and show consistent improvements over the state-of-the-art.