Scene graph is a structured representation of a scene that can clearly express the objects, attributes, and relationships between objects in the scene. As computer vision technology continues to develop, people are no longer satisfied with simply detecting and recognizing objects in images; instead, people look forward to a higher level of understanding and reasoning about visual scenes. For example, given an image, we want to not only detect and recognize objects in the image, but also understand the relationship between objects (visual relationship detection), and generate a text description (image captioning) based on the image content. Alternatively, we might want the machine to tell us what the little girl in the image is doing (Visual Question Answering (VQA)), or even remove the dog from the image and find similar images (image editing and retrieval), etc. These tasks require a higher level of understanding and reasoning for image vision tasks. The scene graph is just such a powerful tool for scene understanding. Therefore, scene graphs have attracted the attention of a large number of researchers, and related research is often cross-modal, complex, and rapidly developing. However, no relatively systematic survey of scene graphs exists at present. To this end, this survey conducts a comprehensive investigation of the current scene graph research. More specifically, we first summarize the general definition of the scene graph, then conducte a comprehensive and systematic discussion on the generation method of the scene graph (SGG) and the SGG with the aid of prior knowledge. We then investigate the main applications of scene graphs and summarize the most commonly used datasets. Finally, we provide some insights into the future development of scene graphs.

Brain-computer interface (BCI) is a system empowering humans to communicate with or control the outside world with exclusively brain intentions. Electroencephalography (EEG)-based BCI is one of the promising solutions due to its convenient and portable instruments. Despite the extensive research of EEG in recent years, it is still challenging to interpret EEG signals effectively due to its nature of noise and difficulties in capturing the inconspicuous relations between EEG signals and specific brain activities. Most existing works either only consider EEG as chain-like sequences while neglecting complex dependencies between adjacent signals or requiring complex preprocessing. In this paper, we introduce two deep learning-based frameworks with novel spatio-temporal preserving representations of raw EEG streams to precisely identify human intentions. The two frameworks consist of both convolutional and recurrent neural networks effectively exploring the preserved spatial and temporal information in either a cascade or a parallel manner. Extensive experiments on a large scale movement intention EEG dataset (108 subjects, 3,145,160 EEG records) have demonstrated that the proposed frameworks achieve high accuracy of 98.3% and outperform a set of state-of-the-art and baseline models. The developed models are further evaluated with a real-world brain typing BCI and achieve a recognition accuracy of 93% over five instruction intentions suggesting good generalization over different kinds of intentions and BCI systems.

Recent years have witnessed the success of deep learning methods in human activity recognition (HAR). The longstanding shortage of labeled activity data inherently calls for a plethora of semisupervised learning methods, and one of the most challenging and common issues with semisupervised learning is the imbalanced distribution of labeled data over classes. Although the problem has long existed in broad real-world HAR applications, it is rarely explored in the literature. In this paper, we propose a semisupervised deep model for imbalanced activity recognition from multimodal wearable sensory data. We aim to address not only the challenges of multimodal sensor data (e.g., interperson variability and interclass similarity) but also the limited labeled data and class-imbalance issues simultaneously. In particular, we propose a pattern-balanced semisupervised framework to extract and preserve diverse latent patterns of activities. Furthermore, we exploit the independence of multi-modalities of sensory data and attentively identify salient regions that are indicative of human activities from inputs by our recurrent convolutional attention networks. Our experimental results demonstrate that the proposed model achieves a competitive performance compared to a multitude of state-of-the-art methods, both semisupervised and supervised ones, with 10% labeled training data. The results also show the robustness of our method over imbalanced, small training data sets.

Video semantic recognition usually suffers from the curse of dimensionality and the absence of enough high-quality labeled instances, thus semisupervised feature selection gains increasing attentions for its efficiency and comprehensibility. Most of the previous methods assume that videos with close distance (neighbors) have similar labels and characterize the intrinsic local structure through a predetermined graph of both labeled and unlabeled data. However, besides the parameter tuning problem underlying the construction of the graph, the affinity measurement in the original feature space usually suffers from the curse of dimensionality. Additionally, the predetermined graph separates itself from the procedure of feature selection, which might lead to downgraded performance for video semantic recognition. In this paper, we exploit a novel semisupervised feature selection method from a new perspective. The primary assumption underlying our model is that the instances with similar labels should have a larger probability of being neighbors. Instead of using a predetermined similarity graph, we incorporate the exploration of the local structure into the procedure of joint feature selection so as to learn the optimal graph simultaneously. Moreover, an adaptive loss function is exploited to measure the label fitness, which significantly enhances model's robustness to videos with a small or substantial loss. We propose an efficient alternating optimization algorithm to solve the proposed challenging problem, together with analyses on its convergence and computational complexity in theory. Finally, extensive experimental results on benchmark datasets illustrate the effectiveness and superiority of the proposed approach on video semantic recognition related tasks.

Pooling plays an important role in generating a discriminative video representation. In this paper, we propose a new semantic pooling approach for challenging event analysis tasks (e.g., event detection, recognition, and recounting) in long untrimmed Internet videos, especially when only a few shots/segments are relevant to the event of interest while many other shots are irrelevant or even misleading. The commonly adopted pooling strategies aggregate the shots indifferently in one way or another, resulting in a great loss of information. Instead, in this work we first define a novel notion of semantic saliency that assesses the relevance of each shot with the event of interest. We then prioritize the shots according to their saliency scores since shots that are semantically more salient are expected to contribute more to the final event analysis. Next, we propose a new isotonic regularizer that is able to exploit the constructed semantic ordering information. The resulting nearly-isotonic support vector machine classifier exhibits higher discriminative power in event analysis tasks. Computationally, we develop an efficient implementation using the proximal gradient algorithm, and we prove new and closed-form proximal steps. We conduct extensive experiments on three real-world video datasets and achieve promising improvements.