Communications of the ACM
Scene Understanding By Labeling Pixels
Credit: Andrew Joyce
Programming computers to automatically interpret the content of an image is a long-standing challenge in artificial intelligence and computer vision. That difficulty is echoed in a well-known anecdote from the early years of computer-vision research in which an undergraduate student at MIT was asked to spend his summer getting a computer to describe what it "saw" in images obtained from a video camera.35 Almost 50 years later researchers are still grappling with the same problem.
Key Insights
A scene can be described in many ways and include details about objects, regions, geometry, location, activities, and even nonvisual attributes (such as date and time). For example, a typical urban scene (see Figure 1) can be described by specifying the location of the foreground car object and background grass, sky, and road regions. Alternatively, the image could be summarized as a street scene. We would like a computer to be able to reason about all these aspects of the scene and provide both coarse image-level tags and detailed pixel-level annotations describing the semantics and geometry of the scene. Early computer-vision systems attempted to do just that by using a single unified model to jointly describe all aspects of the scene. However, the difficulty of the problem soon overwhelmed this unified approach, and, until recently, research into scene understanding has proceeded along many separate trajectories.
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