Humans comprehend a natural scene at a single glance; painters and other visual artists, through their abstract representations, stressed this capacity to the limit. The performance of computer vision solutions matched that of humans in many problems of visual recognition. In this paper we address the problem of recognizing the genre (subject) in digitized paintings using Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) as part of the more general dealing with abstract and or artistic representation of scenes. Initially we establish the state of the art performance by training a CNN from scratch. In the next level of evaluation, we identify aspects that hinder the CNNs' recognition, such as artistic abstraction. Further, we test various domain adaptation methods that could enhance the subject recognition capabilities of the CNNs. The evaluation is performed on a database of 80,000 annotated digitized paintings, which is tentatively extended with artistic photographs, either original or stylized, in order to emulate artistic representations. Surprisingly, the most efficient domain adaptation is not the neural style transfer. Finally, the paper provides an experiment-based assessment of the abstraction level that CNNs are able to achieve.
Scene recognition is one of the hallmark tasks of computer vision, allowing definition of a context for object recognition. Whereas the tremendous recent progress in object recognition tasks is due to the availability of large datasets like ImageNet and the rise of Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) for learning high-level features, performance at scene recognition has not attained the same level of success. This may be because current deep features trained from ImageNet are not competitive enough for such tasks. Here, we introduce a new scene-centric database called Places with over 7 million labeled pictures of scenes. We propose new methods to compare the density and diversity of image datasets and show that Places is as dense as other scene datasets and has more diversity. Using CNN, we learn deep features for scene recognition tasks, and establish new state-of-the-art results on several scene-centric datasets. A visualization of the CNN layers' responses allows us to show differences in the internal representations of object-centric and scene-centric networks. Since scenes are composed in part of objects, accurate recognition of scenes requires knowledge about both scenes and objects. In this paper we address two related problems: 1) scale induced dataset bias in multi-scale convolutional neural network (CNN) architectures, and 2) how to combine effectively scene-centric and object-centric knowledge (i.e. Places and ImageNet) in CNNs. An earlier attempt, Hybrid-CNN[23], showed that incorporating ImageNet did not help much. Here we propose an alternative method taking the scale into account, resulting in significant recognition gains. By analyzing the response of ImageNet-CNNs and Places-CNNs at different scales we find that both operate in different scale ranges, so using the same network for all the scales induces dataset bias resulting in limited performance. Thus, adapting the feature extractor to each particular scale (i.e. scale-specific CNNs) is crucial to improve recognition, since the objects in the scenes have their specific range of scales. Experimental results show that the recognition accuracy highly depends on the scale, and that simple yet carefully chosen multi-scale combinations of ImageNet-CNNs and Places-CNNs, can push the stateof-the-art recognition accuracy in SUN397 up to 66.26 (and even 70.17 with deeper architectures, comparable to human performance). Scene categorization is a fundamental problem in computer vision. However, scene understanding research has been constrained by the limited scope of currently-used databases which do not capture the full variety of scene categories. Whereas standard databases for object categorization contain hundreds of different classes of objects, the largest available dataset of scene categories contains only 15 classes. In this paper we propose the extensive Scene UNderstanding (SUN) database that contains 899 categories and 130,519 images. We use 397 well-sampled categories to evaluate numerous state-of-the-art algorithms for scene recognition and establish new bounds of performance. We measure human scene classification performance on the SUN database and compare this with computational methods. Additionally, we study a finer-grained scene representation to detect scenes embedded inside of larger scenes.