Semantic modeling of natural scenes based on contextual Bayesian networks

This paper presents a novel approach based on contextual Bayesian networks (CBN) for natural scene modeling and classification. The structure of the CBN is derived based on domain knowledge, and parameters are learned from training images. For test images, the hybrid streams of semantic features of image content and spatial information are piped into the CBN-based inference engine, which is capable of incorporating domain knowledge as well as dealing with a number of input evidences, producing the category labels of the entire image. We demonstrate the promise of this approach for natural scene classification, comparing it with several state-of-art approaches.