Structured Generative Models for Scene Understanding
It addresses the problem of interpretable and editable scene reconstruction for computer vision researchers, but it is incremental as it reviews existing approaches and outlines challenges without introducing new methods or data.
This position paper advocates for structured generative models (SGMs) to tackle the problem of 3D scene understanding from images, aiming to reconstruct scenes by explaining image contents through objects with attributes like type, shape, appearance, and pose, along with global variables such as lighting and camera parameters, but it does not present specific results or concrete numbers.
This position paper argues for the use of \emph{structured generative models} (SGMs) for the understanding of static scenes. This requires the reconstruction of a 3D scene from an input image (or a set of multi-view images), whereby the contents of the image(s) are causally explained in terms of models of instantiated objects, each with their own type, shape, appearance and pose, along with global variables like scene lighting and camera parameters. This approach also requires scene models which account for the co-occurrences and inter-relationships of objects in a scene. The SGM approach has the merits that it is compositional and generative, which lead to interpretability and editability. \\\\ To pursue the SGM agenda, we need models for objects and scenes, and approaches to carry out inference. We first review models for objects, which include ``things'' (object categories that have a well defined shape), and ``stuff'' (categories which have amorphous spatial extent). We then move on to review \emph{scene models} which describe the inter-relationships of objects. Perhaps the most challenging problem for SGMs is \emph{inference} of the objects, lighting and camera parameters, and scene inter-relationships from input consisting of a single or multiple images. We conclude with a discussion of issues that need addressing to advance the SGM agenda.