About this Research Topic
Further complicating the study of scene understanding is the multi-faceted nature of the research topic. Scene understanding means different things to different researchers. For some, it is scene categorization—the ability to rapidly recognize a scene as a street, a forest, or a room. For others it is scene segmentation—using knowledge of the scene category to recognize all of its constituent regions and objects. Still others equate scene understanding with scene perception—determining the relationships between the objects in a scene, between the objects and surfaces, and what elements belong in the perceptual foreground and background. And finally there is the scene’s gist, knowing what the scene is about—its “story”. This might be as simple as the category of the scene (a beach), or a far more elaborated description (a boy and a girl preventing a dog from jumping on the sand castle that they just built). Do these different facets of scene understanding reflect different independent dimensions, or do they represent different stages in the understanding of a scene? In this Research Topic we will explore what it means to understand a scene, and how the different methods and techniques developed by different disciplines might be combined and used to accelerate the understanding of scene understanding.
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