Exploring Sparse Spatial Relation in Graph Inference for Text-Based VQA

Text-based visual question answering (TextVQA) faces the significant challenge of avoiding redundant relational inference. To be specific, a large number of detected objects and optical character recognition (OCR) tokens result in rich visual relationships. Existing works take all visual relationshi...

Ausführliche Beschreibung

Bibliographische Detailangaben
Veröffentlicht in:IEEE transactions on image processing : a publication of the IEEE Signal Processing Society. - 1992. - 32(2023) vom: 19., Seite 5060-5074
1. Verfasser: Zhou, Sheng (VerfasserIn)
Weitere Verfasser: Guo, Dan, Li, Jia, Yang, Xun, Wang, Meng
Format: Online-Aufsatz
Sprache:English
Veröffentlicht: 2023
Zugriff auf das übergeordnete Werk:IEEE transactions on image processing : a publication of the IEEE Signal Processing Society
Schlagworte:Journal Article
Beschreibung
Zusammenfassung:Text-based visual question answering (TextVQA) faces the significant challenge of avoiding redundant relational inference. To be specific, a large number of detected objects and optical character recognition (OCR) tokens result in rich visual relationships. Existing works take all visual relationships into account for answer prediction. However, there are three observations: (1) a single subject in the images can be easily detected as multiple objects with distinct bounding boxes (considered repetitive objects). The associations between these repetitive objects are superfluous for answer reasoning; (2) two spatially distant OCR tokens detected in the image frequently have weak semantic dependencies for answer reasoning; and (3) the co-existence of nearby objects and tokens may be indicative of important visual cues for predicting answers. Rather than utilizing all of them for answer prediction, we make an effort to identify the most important connections or eliminate redundant ones. We propose a sparse spatial graph network (SSGN) that introduces a spatially aware relation pruning technique to this task. As spatial factors for relation measurement, we employ spatial distance, geometric dimension, overlap area, and DIoU for spatially aware pruning. We consider three visual relationships for graph learning: object-object, OCR-OCR tokens, and object-OCR token relationships. SSGN is a progressive graph learning architecture that verifies the pivotal relations in the correlated object-token sparse graph, and then in the respective object-based sparse graph and token-based sparse graph. Experiment results on TextVQA and ST-VQA datasets demonstrate that SSGN achieves promising performances. And some visualization results further demonstrate the interpretability of our method
Beschreibung:Date Revised 13.09.2023
published: Print-Electronic
Citation Status PubMed-not-MEDLINE
ISSN:1941-0042
DOI:10.1109/TIP.2023.3310332