Relationship graph learning network for visual relationship detection

Visual relationship detection aims to predict the relationships between detected object pairs. It is well believed that the correlations between image components (i.e., objects and relationships between objects) are significant considerations when predicting objects' relationships. However, most current visual relationship detection methods only exploited the correlations among objects, and the correlations among objects' relationships remained underexplored. This paper proposes a relationship graph learning network (RGLN) to explore the correlations among objects' relationships for visual relationship detection. Specifically, RGLN obtains image objects using an object detector, and then, every pair of objects constitutes a relationship proposal. All relationship proposals construct a relationship graph, in which the proposals are treated as nodes. Accordingly, RGLN designs bi-stream graph attention subnetworks to detect relationship proposals, in which one graph attention subnetwork analyzes correlations among relationships based on visual and spatial information, and the other analyzes correlations based on semantic and spatial information. Besides, RGLN exploits a relationship selection subnetwork to ignore redundant information of object pairs with no relationships. We conduct extensive experiments on two public datasets: the VRD and the VG datasets. The experimental results compared with the state-of-the-art demonstrate the competitiveness of RGLN.