RI: Small: Hierarchical Visual Scene Understanding

人工和生物智能系统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全面的框架，将认知、计算和神经方法整合到知识的组织中。该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知识。其目的是确定哪些分类法最适合解决不同的视觉任务，并使用计算机视觉算法来组织视觉环境，就像人类一样。例如，场景之间的语义关系可以通过层次树很好地捕获（例如，巴西利卡是一种教堂，这是一种建筑物），但不同环境之间的功能相似性可能最好表示为集群（例如，餐馆，厨房和野餐区聚集为吃饭的地方;办公室和网吧作为工作的地方）。由于层次和分类提供了一种形式化许多类型的上下文信息（空间，时间和语义）的方法，因此它们可以用于增强计算机视觉系统在对象和场景识别方面的性能，并有助于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外，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.