We develop a comprehensive Bayesian generative model for understanding indoor scenes. While it is common in this domain to approximate objects with 3D bounding boxes, we propose using strong representations with finer granularity. For example, we model a chair as a set of four legs, a seat and a backrest. We find that modeling detailed geometry improves recognition and reconstruction, and enables more refined use of appearance for scene understanding. We demonstrate this with a new likelihood function that rewards 3D object hypotheses whose 2D projection is more uniform in color distribution. Such a measure would be confused by background pixels if we used a bounding box to represent a concave object like a chair. Complex objects are modeled using a set or re-usable 3D parts, and we show that this representation captures much of the variation among object instances with relatively few parameters. We also designed specific data-driven inference mechanisms for each part that are shared by all objects containing that part, which helps make inference transparent to the modeler. Further, we show how to exploit contextual relationships to detect more objects, by, for example, proposing chairs around and underneath tables. We present results showing the benefits of each of these innovations. The performance of our approach often exceeds that of state-of-the-art methods on the two tasks of room layout estimation and object recognition, as evaluated on two bench mark data sets used in this domain.

We propose a method for understanding the 3D geometry of indoor environments (e.g. bedrooms, kitchens) while simultaneously identifying objects in the scene (e.g. beds, couches, doors). We focus on how modeling the geometry and location of specific objects is helpful for indoor scene understanding. For example, beds are shorter than they are wide, and are more likely to be in the center of the room than cabinets, which are tall and narrow. We use a generative statistical model that integrates a camera model, an enclosing room “box”, frames (windows, doors, pictures), and objects (beds, tables, couches, cabinets), each with their own prior on size, relative dimensions, and locations. We fit the parameters of this complex, multi-dimensional statistical model using an MCMC sampling approach that combines discrete changes (e.g, adding a bed), and continuous parameter changes (e.g., making the bed larger). We find that introducing object category leads to state-of-the-art performance on room layout estimation, while also enabling recognition based only on geometry.

We present a method for automatically aligning words to image regions that integrates specific object classifiers (e.g., "car" detectors) with weak models based on appearance features. Previous strategies have largely focused on the latter, and thus have not exploited progress on object category recognition. Hence, we augment region labeling with object detection, which simplifies the problem by reliably identifying a subset of the labels, and thereby reducing correspondence ambiguity overall. Comprehensive testing on the SAIAPR TC dataset shows that principled integration of object detection improves the region labeling task.