Detecting human-object interaction with multi-level pairwise feature network

Human-object interaction (HOI) detection is crucial for human-centric image understanding which aims to infer human, action, object triplets within an image. Recent studies often exploit visual features and the spatial configuration of a human-object pair in order to learn the action linking the human and object in the pair. We argue that such a paradigm of pairwise feature extraction and action inference can be applied not only at the whole human and object instance level, but also at the part level at which a body part interacts with an object, and at the semantic level by considering the semantic label of an object along with human appearance and human-object spatial configuration, to infer the action. We thus propose a multi-level pairwise feature network (PFNet) for detecting human-object interactions. The network consists of three parallel streams to characterize HOI utilizing pairwise features at the above three levels; the three streams are finally fused to give the action prediction. Extensive experiments show that our proposed PFNet outperforms other state-of-the-art methods on the V-COCO dataset and achieves comparable results to the state-of-the-art on the HICO-DET dataset.