A principle for unsupervised hierarchical decomposition of visual scenes
Structure in a visual scene can be described at many levels of granular
ity. At a coarse level, the scene is composed of objects; at a finer level,
each object is made up of parts, and the parts of subparts. In this work, I
propose a simple principle by which such hierarchical structure can be
extracted from visual scenes: Regularity in the relations among different
parts of an object is weaker than in the internal structure of a part. This
principle can be applied recursively to define part-whole relationships
among elements in a scene. The principle does not make use of object
models, categories, or other sorts of higher-level knowledge; rather,
part-whole relationships can be established based on the statistics of a
set of sample visual scenes. I illustrate with a model that performs unsu
pervised decomposition of simple scenes. The model can account for
the results from a human learning experiment on the ontogeny of part-whole
relationships.
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