Panoptic Video Scene Graph Generation

Towards building comprehensive real-world visual perception systems, we propose and study a new problem called panoptic scene graph generation (PVSG). PVSG relates to the existing video scene graph generation (VidSGG) problem, which focuses on temporal interactions between humans and objects grounded with bounding boxes in videos. However, the limitation of bounding boxes in detecting non-rigid objects and backgrounds often causes VidSGG to miss key details crucial for comprehensive video understanding. In contrast, PVSG requires nodes in scene graphs to be grounded by more precise, pixel-level segmentation masks, which facilitate holistic scene understanding. To advance research in this new area, we contribute the PVSG dataset, which consists of 400 videos (289 third-person + 111 egocentric videos) with a total of 150K frames labeled with panoptic segmentation masks as well as fine, temporal scene graphs. We also provide a variety of baseline methods and share useful design practices for future work.

Pair then Relation: Pair-Net for Panoptic Scene Graph Generation

Panoptic Scene Graph (PSG) is a challenging task in Scene Graph Generation (SGG) that aims to create a more comprehensive scene graph representation using panoptic segmentation instead of boxes. Compared to SGG, PSG has several challenging problems: pixel-level segment outputs and full relationship exploration (It also considers thing and stuff relation). Thus, current PSG methods have limited performance, which hinders downstream tasks or applications. The goal of this work aims to design a novel and strong baseline for PSG. To achieve that, we first conduct an in-depth analysis to identify the bottleneck of the current PSG models, finding that inter-object pair-wise recall is a crucial factor that was ignored by previous PSG methods. Based on this and the recent query-based frameworks, we present a novel framework: Pair then Relation (Pair-Net), which uses a Pair Proposal Network (PPN) to learn and filter sparse pair-wise relationships between subjects and objects. Moreover, we also observed the sparse nature of object pairs for both Motivated by this, we design a lightweight Matrix Learner within the PPN, which directly learn pair-wised relationships for pair proposal generation. Through extensive ablation and analysis, our approach significantly improves upon leveraging the segmenter solid baseline. Notably, our method achieves new state-of-the-art results on the PSG benchmark, with over 10\% absolute gains compared to PSGFormer. The code of this paper is publicly available at https://github.com/king159/Pair-Net.

Panoptic Scene Graph Generation

Existing research addresses scene graph generation (SGG) -- a critical technology for scene understanding in images -- from a detection perspective, i.e., objects are detected using bounding boxes followed by prediction of their pairwise relationships. We argue that such a paradigm causes several problems that impede the progress of the field. For instance, bounding box-based labels in current datasets usually contain redundant classes like hairs, and leave out background information that is crucial to the understanding of context. In this work, we introduce panoptic scene graph generation (PSG), a new problem task that requires the model to generate a more comprehensive scene graph representation based on panoptic segmentations rather than rigid bounding boxes. A high-quality PSG dataset, which contains 49k well-annotated overlapping images from COCO and Visual Genome, is created for the community to keep track of its progress. For benchmarking, we build four two-stage baselines, which are modified from classic methods in SGG, and two one-stage baselines called PSGTR and PSGFormer, which are based on the efficient Transformer-based detector, i.e., DETR. While PSGTR uses a set of queries to directly learn triplets, PSGFormer separately models the objects and relations in the form of queries from two Transformer decoders, followed by a prompting-like relation-object matching mechanism. In the end, we share insights on open challenges and future directions.