Pairwise CNN-Transformer Features for Human–Object Interaction Detection

Abstract

Human–object interaction (HOI) detection aims to localize and recognize the relationship between humans and objects, which helps computers understand high-level semantics. In HOI detection, two-stage and one-stage methods have distinct advantages and disadvantages. The two-stage methods can obtain high-quality human–object pair features based on object detection but lack contextual information. The one-stage transformer-based methods can model good global features but cannot benefit from object detection. The ideal model should have the advantages of both methods. Therefore, we propose the Pairwise Convolutional neural network (CNN)-Transformer (PCT), a simple and effective two-stage method. The model both fully utilizes the object detector and has rich contextual information. Specifically, we obtain pairwise CNN features from the CNN backbone. These features are fused with pairwise transformer features to enhance the pairwise representations. The enhanced representations are superior to using CNN and transformer features individually. In addition, the global features of the transformer provide valuable contextual cues. We fairly compare the performance of pairwise CNN and pairwise transformer features in HOI detection. The experimental results show that the previously neglected CNN features still have a significant edge. Compared to state-of-the-art methods, our model achieves competitive results on the HICO-DET and V-COCO datasets.