We propose a novel problem revolving around two tasks: (i) given a scene, recommend objects to insert, and (ii) given an object category, retrieve suitable background scenes. A bounding box for the inserted object is predicted in both tasks, which helps downstream applications such as semi-automated advertising and video composition. The major challenge lies in the fact that the target object is neither present nor localized in the input, and furthermore, available datasets only provide scenes with existing objects. To tackle this problem, we build an unsupervised algorithm based on object-level contexts, which explicitly models the joint probability distribution of object categories and bounding boxes using a Gaussian mixture model. Experiments on our own annotated test set demonstrate that our system outperforms existing baselines on all sub-tasks, and does so using a unified framework. Future extensions and applications are suggested.

Indoor scene synthesis has become a popular topic in recent years. Synthesizing functional and plausible indoor scenes is an inherently difficult task since it requires considerable knowledge to both choose reasonable object categories and arrange objects appropriately. In this survey, we propose four criteria which group a wide range of 3D (three-dimensional) indoor scene synthesis techniques according to various aspects (specifically, four groups of categories). It also provides hints, through comprehensively comparing all the techniques to demonstrate their effectiveness and drawbacks, and discussions of potential remaining problems.

Abstract Cross-depiction is the recognition—and synthesis—of objects whether they are photographed, painted, drawn, etc. It is a significant yet under-researched problem. Emulating the remarkable human ability to recognise and depict objects in an astonishingly wide variety of depictive forms is likely to advance both the foundations and the applications of computer vision. In this paper we motivate the cross-depiction problem, explain why it is difficult, and discuss some current approaches. Our main conclusions are (i) appearance-based recognition systems tend to be over-fitted to one depiction, (ii) models that explicitly encode spatial relations between parts are more robust, and (iii) recognition and non-photorealistic synthesis are related tasks.