RI: Small: Hierarchical Visual Scene Understanding

智能系统，无论是人工的还是生物的，都必须找到有效的方法来组织复杂的视觉世界。场景理解的跨学科领域需要一个综合框架，在该框架中整合认知、计算和神经方法来组织知识。这项研究计划旨在创建一个框架，用于组织人类和人工系统在世界导航或浏览视觉数据库时遇到的视觉环境的知识。其目的是确定哪些分类最适合解决不同的视觉任务，并像人类一样使用计算机视觉算法来组织视觉环境。例如，场景之间的语义关系被层次树很好地捕捉到(例如，大教堂是一种类型的教堂，这是一种类型的建筑)，但不同环境之间的功能相似性可能最好地表示为集群(例如，餐馆、厨房和野餐区域集群为用餐场所；办公室和网吧S作为工作场所)。由于层次和分类提供了一种将许多类型的上下文信息(空间、时间和语义)形式化的方法，因此它们可用于增强计算机视觉系统在对象和场景识别方面的性能，并帮助开发更智能的图像搜索算法。除了作为比较不同模型和理论的统一基准，该企业还为研究和课程提供新的教学和应用工具，这些工具将通过网站和研讨会提供。

Intelligent systems, both artificial and biological, must find effective ways to organize a complex visual world. The cross-disciplinary field of scene understanding is in need of a comprehensive framework in which to integrate cognitive, computational and neural approaches to the organization of knowledge. This research program aims to create a framework for organizing knowledge of visual environments that human and artificial systems encounter when navigating in the world or browsing visual databases. The aim is to determine which taxonomies are best suited for solving different visual tasks, and use computer vision algorithms to organize visual environments as humans do. For example, semantic relationships between scenes are well captured by a hierarchical tree (e.g. a basilica is a type of church, which is a type of building) but functional similarities between different environments may be best represented as clusters (e.g. restaurants, kitchens and picnic areas clustered as places to eat; offices and internet cafés as places to work). Because hierarchies and taxonomies provide a way of formalizing many types of contextual information (spatial, temporal, and semantic), they can be used to enhance the performance of computer vision systems at object and scene recognition, and aid in the development of smarter image search algorithms. Besides serving as a unified benchmark for comparing different models and theories, this enterprise offers new teaching and applied tools for research and courses, which will be made available through websites and symposia.