Segmentation-grounded Scene Graph Generation

Scene graph generation has emerged as an important problem in computer vision. While scene graphs provide a grounded representation of objects, their locations and relations in an image, they do so only at the granularity of proposal bounding boxes. In this work, we propose the first, to our knowledge, framework for pixel-level segmentation-grounded scene graph generation. Our framework is agnostic to the underlying scene graph generation method and address the lack of segmentation annotations in target scene graph datasets (e.g., Visual Genome [24]) through transfer and multi-task learning from, and with, an auxiliary dataset (e.g., MS COCO [29]). Specifically, each target object being detected is endowed with a segmentation mask, which is expressed as a lingual-similarity weighted linear combination over categories that have annotations present in an auxiliary dataset. These inferred masks, along with a Gaussian masking mechanism which grounds the relations at a pixel-level within the image, allow for improved relation prediction. The entire framework is end-to-end trainable and is learned in a multi-task manner. Code is available at github.com/ubc-vision/segmentation-sg.