Context-driven Visual Object Recognition based on Knowledge Graphs
This addresses the robustness issue in object recognition for real-world and transfer learning scenarios, but it is incremental as it builds on existing deep learning methods by adding contextual knowledge.
The paper tackles the problem of deep learning object recognition models failing in new environments due to lack of contextual knowledge, proposing an approach that infuses knowledge graph-based context into DNNs to enhance robustness, with experimental results showing different contextual views lead to varied predictions and improved out-of-distribution performance.
Current deep learning methods for object recognition are purely data-driven and require a large number of training samples to achieve good results. Due to their sole dependence on image data, these methods tend to fail when confronted with new environments where even small deviations occur. Human perception, however, has proven to be significantly more robust to such distribution shifts. It is assumed that their ability to deal with unknown scenarios is based on extensive incorporation of contextual knowledge. Context can be based either on object co-occurrences in a scene or on memory of experience. In accordance with the human visual cortex which uses context to form different object representations for a seen image, we propose an approach that enhances deep learning methods by using external contextual knowledge encoded in a knowledge graph. Therefore, we extract different contextual views from a generic knowledge graph, transform the views into vector space and infuse it into a DNN. We conduct a series of experiments to investigate the impact of different contextual views on the learned object representations for the same image dataset. The experimental results provide evidence that the contextual views influence the image representations in the DNN differently and therefore lead to different predictions for the same images. We also show that context helps to strengthen the robustness of object recognition models for out-of-distribution images, usually occurring in transfer learning tasks or real-world scenarios.