Understanding Social Relationships with Person-Pair Relations

Social relationship understanding infers existing social relationships among individuals in a given scenario,which has been demonstrated to have a wide range of practical value in reality.However,existing methods infer the social relationship of each person pair in isolation,without considering the context-aware information for person pairs in the same scenario.The context-aware information for person pairs exists extensively in reality,that is,the social relationships of different person pairs in a simple scenario are always related to each other.For instance,if most of the person pairs in a simple scenario have the same social relationship,“friends”,then the other pairs have a high probability of being“friends”or other similar coarse-level relationships,such as“intimate”.This context-aware information should thus be considered in social relationship understanding.Therefore,this paper proposes a novel end-to-end trainable Person-Pair Relation Network(PPRN),which is a GRU-based graph inference network,to first extract the visual and position information as the person-pair feature information,then enable it to transfer on a fully-connected social graph,and finally utilizes different aggregators to collect different kinds of person-pair information.Unlike existing methods,the method—with its message passing mechanism in the graph model—can infer the social relationship of each person-pair in a joint way(i.e.,not in isolation).Extensive experiments on People In Social Context(PISC)-and People In Photo Album(PIPA)-relation datasets show the superiority of our method compared to other methods.