Semantic-embedded Similarity Prototype for Scene Recognition

Due to the high inter-class similarity caused by the complex composition and the co-existing objects across scenes, numerous studies have explored object semantic knowledge within scenes to improve scene recognition. However, a resulting challenge emerges as object information extraction techniques require heavy computational costs, thereby burdening the network considerably. This limitation often renders object-assisted approaches incompatible with edge devices in practical deployment. In contrast, this paper proposes a semantic knowledge-based similarity prototype, which can help the scene recognition network achieve superior accuracy without increasing the computational cost in practice. It is simple and can be plug-and-played into existing pipelines. More specifically, a statistical strategy is introduced to depict semantic knowledge in scenes as class-level semantic representations. These representations are used to explore correlations between scene classes, ultimately constructing a similarity prototype. Furthermore, we propose to leverage the similarity prototype to support network training from the perspective of Gradient Label Softening and Batch-level Contrastive Loss, respectively. Comprehensive evaluations on multiple benchmarks show that our similarity prototype enhances the performance of existing networks, all while avoiding any additional computational burden in practical deployments. Code and the statistical similarity prototype will be available soon.