Visual recognition with humans in the loop

Research output: Contribution to journalConference articleResearchpeer-review

  • Steve Branson
  • Catherine Wah
  • Florian Schroff
  • Boris Babenko
  • Peter Welinder
  • Pietro Perona
  • Belongie, Serge

We present an interactive, hybrid human-computer method for object classification. The method applies to classes of objects that are recognizable by people with appropriate expertise (e.g., animal species or airplane model), but not (in general) by people without such expertise. It can be seen as a visual version of the 20 questions game, where questions based on simple visual attributes are posed interactively. The goal is to identify the true class while minimizing the number of questions asked, using the visual content of the image. We introduce a general framework for incorporating almost any off-the-shelf multi-class object recognition algorithm into the visual 20 questions game, and provide methodologies to account for imperfect user responses and unreliable computer vision algorithms. We evaluate our methods on Birds-200, a difficult dataset of 200 tightly-related bird species, and on the Animals With Attributes dataset. Our results demonstrate that incorporating user input drives up recognition accuracy to levels that are good enough for practical applications, while at the same time, computer vision reduces the amount of human interaction required.

Original languageEnglish
JournalLecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics)
Issue numberPART 4
Pages (from-to)438-451
Number of pages14
ISSN0302-9743
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2010
Externally publishedYes
Event11th European Conference on Computer Vision, ECCV 2010 - Heraklion, Crete, Greece
Duration: 10 Sep 201011 Sep 2010

Conference

Conference11th European Conference on Computer Vision, ECCV 2010
CountryGreece
CityHeraklion, Crete
Period10/09/201011/09/2010
SponsorDAGM, IBM, NICTA

ID: 302048098