Guest Editorial: Scene Understanding

Abstract

Scene understanding is the ability to visually analyze a scene to answer questions such as: What is happening? Why is it happening? What will happen next? What should I do? For example, in the context of driving safety, the vision system would need to recognize nearby people and vehicles, anticipate their motions, infer traffic patterns, and detect road conditions. So far, research has focused on providing complete (e.g., every pixel labeled) or holistic (reasoning about several different scene elements) interpretations, often taking into account scene geometry or 3D spatial relationships.