What Do You Do? Occupation Recognition in a Photo via Social Context

Ming Shao, Liangyue Li, Yun Fu; Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2013, pp. 3631-3638

In this paper, we investigate the problem of recognizing occupations of multiple people with arbitrary poses in a photo. Previous work utilizing single person's nearly frontal clothing information and fore/background context preliminarily proves that occupation recognition is computationally feasible in computer vision. However, in practice, multiple people with arbitrary poses are common in a photo, and recognizing their occupations is even more challenging. We argue that with appropriately built visual attributes, co-occurrence, and spatial configuration model that is learned through structure SVM, we can recognize multiple people's occupations in a photo simultaneously. To evaluate our method's performance, we conduct extensive experiments on a new well-labeled occupation database with 14 representative occupations and over 7K images. Results on this database validate our method's effectiveness and show that occupation recognition is solvable in a more general case.