Amorphous Region Context Modeling for Scene Recognition

Scene images are usually composed of foreground and background regional contents. Some existing methods propose to extract regional contents with dense grids or objectness region proposals. However, dense grids may split the object into several discrete parts, learning semantic ambiguity for the patches. The objectness methods may focus on particular objects but only pay attention to the foreground contents and do not exploit the background that is key to scene recognition. In contrast, we propose a novel scene recognition framework with amorphous region detection and context modeling. In the proposed framework, discriminative regions are first detected with amorphous contours that can tightly surround the targets through semantic segmentation techniques. In addition, both foreground and background regions are jointly embedded to obtain the scene representations with the graph model. Based on the graph modeling module, we explore the contextual relations between the regions in geometric and morphology aspects, and generate the discriminative representations for scene recognition. Experimental results on MIT67 and SUN397 demonstrate the effectiveness and generality of the proposed method.