iCAN module uses faster R-CNN for detecting Human-Object Interaction

Researchers from Virginia Tech, Chen Gao, Yuliang Zou, and Jia-Bin Huang, recently published a paper on ‘iCAN: Instance-Centric Attention Network for Human-Object Interaction Detection.’ In it, they propose an ‘instance-centric attention module’ (iCAN) for human-object interaction detection. This module uses an incredibly fast regional convolutional neural network (R-CNN), which, in turn, is much more effective in identifying and understanding the human-object interaction.

In order to understand the situation in a scene or an image, computers need to recognize how humans interact with surrounding objects. This can be done using human-object interaction, localizes a person and an object, and then well as identifies the relationship - or interaction - between them.

The core idea of this research is that an image of a person or an object contains informational cues on the most relevant parts of an image for an algorithm to attend to - this means making predictions should be easier.

To exploit this cue, researchers propose an instance-centric attention module that learns to dynamically highlight regions in an image conditioned on the appearance of each instance. Thus, this network allows to selectively aggregate features relevant for recognizing human-object interactions. The researchers validated the efficacy of the proposed network using the COCO and HICO-DET datasets and showed that this approach compares favorably with the state-of-the-art.

iCAN module

Highlights of the iCAN paper include:

1. The researchers have introduced an instance-centric attention module that allows the network to dynamically highlight informative regions for improving HOI detection.
2. They have also established a new state-of-the-art performance on two large-scale HOI benchmark datasets.
3. They conducted a detailed ablation study and error analysis to identify the relative contributions of the individual components and quantify different types of errors.
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4. They also released the source code and pre-trained models to facilitate future research.

Advantages of the iCAN module

• Unlike hand-designed contextual features based on pose, the entire image, or secondary regions, iCAN’s attention map is automatically learned and jointly trained with the rest of the networks for improving the performance.
• On comparing with attention modules designed for image-level classification, the instance-centric attention map provides greater flexibility as it allows attending to different regions in an image depending on different object instances.

To know about iCAN in detail head on to the research paper.

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