Scenarios: A New Representation for Complex Scene Understanding

The ability for computational agents to reason about the high-level content of real world scene images is important for many applications. Existing attempts at addressing the problem of complex scene understanding lack representational power, efficiency, and the ability to create robust meta-knowledge about scenes. In this paper, we introduce scenarios as a new way of representing scenes. The scenario is a simple, low-dimensional, data-driven representation consisting of sets of frequently co-occurring objects and is useful for a wide range of scene understanding tasks. We learn scenarios from data using a novel matrix factorization method which we integrate into a new neural network architecture, the ScenarioNet. Using ScenarioNet, we can recover semantic information about real world scene images at three levels of granularity: 1) scene categories, 2) scenarios, and 3) objects. Training a single ScenarioNet model enables us to perform scene classification, scenario recognition, multi-object recognition, content-based scene image retrieval, and content-based image comparison. In addition to solving many tasks in a single, unified framework, ScenarioNet is more computationally efficient than other CNNs because it requires significantly fewer parameters while achieving similar performance on benchmark tasks and is more interpretable because it produces explanations when making decisions. We validate the utility of scenarios and ScenarioNet on a diverse set of scene understanding tasks on several benchmark datasets.