Leverage Interactive Affinity for Affordance Learning

Perceiving potential “action possibilities” (i.e., affordance) regions of images and learning interactive functionalities of objects from human demonstration is a challenging task due to the diversity of human-object interactions. Prevailing affordance learning algorithms often adopt the label assignment paradigm and presume that there is a unique relationship between functional region and affordance label, yielding poor performance when adapting to unseen environments with large appearance variations. In this paper, we propose to leverage interactive affinity for affordance learning, i.e., extracting interactive affinity from human-object interaction and transferring it to non-interactive objects. Interactive affinity, which represents the contacts between different parts of the human body and local regions of the target object, can provide inherent cues of interconnectivity between humans and objects, thereby reducing the ambiguity of the perceived action possibilities. Specifically, we propose a pose-aided interactive affinity learning framework that exploits human pose to guide the network to learn the interactive affinity from human-object interactions. Particularly, a keypoint heuristic perception (KHP) scheme is devised to exploit the keypoint association of human pose to alleviate the uncertainties due to interaction diversities and contact occlusions. Besides, a contact-driven affordance learning (CAL) dataset is constructed by collecting and labeling over 5,000 images. Experimental results demonstrate that our method outperforms the representative models regarding objective metrics and visual quality. Code and dataset: github.com/lhc1224/PIAL-Net.