Discovering Object Functionality

Bangpeng Yao, Jiayuan Ma, Li Fei-Fei; Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2013, pp. 2512-2519

Object functionality refers to the quality of an object that allows humans to perform some specific actions. It has been shown in psychology that functionality (affordance) is at least as essential as appearance in object recognition by humans. In computer vision, most previous work on functionality either assumes exactly one functionality for each object, or requires detailed annotation of human poses and objects. In this paper, we propose a weakly supervised approach to discover all possible object functionalities. Each object functionality is represented by a specific type of human-object interaction. Our method takes any possible human-object interaction into consideration, and evaluates image similarity in 3D rather than 2D in order to cluster human-object interactions more coherently. Experimental results on a dataset of people interacting with musical instruments show the effectiveness of our approach.