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The increasing demand for automatic high-level image understanding, particularly in detecting abstract concepts (AC) within images, underscores the necessity for innovative and more interpretable approaches. These approaches need to harmonize traditional deep vision methods with the nuanced, context-dependent knowledge humans employ to interpret images at intricate semantic levels. In this work, we leverage situated perceptual knowledge of cultural images to enhance performance and interpretability in AC image classification. We automatically extract perceptual semantic units from images, which we then model and integrate into the ARTstract Knowledge Graph (AKG). This resource captures situated perceptual semantics gleaned from over 14,000 cultural images labeled with ACs. Additionally, we enhance the AKG with high-level linguistic frames. We compute KG embeddings and experiment with relative representations and hybrid approaches that fuse these embeddings with visual transformer embeddings. Finally, for interpretability, we conduct posthoc qualitative analyses by examining model similarities with training instances. Our results show that our hybrid KGE-ViT methods outperform existing techniques in AC image classification. The posthoc interpretability analyses reveal the visual transformer's proficiency in capturing pixel-level visual attributes, contrasting with our method's efficacy in representing more abstract and semantic scene elements. We demonstrate the synergy and complementarity between KGE embeddings' situated perceptual knowledge and deep visual model's sensory-perceptual understanding for AC image classification. This work suggests a strong potential of neuro-symbolic methods for knowledge integration and robust image representation for use in downstream intricate visual comprehension tasks. All the materials and code are available online., Comment: Preprint

The field of Computer Vision (CV) is increasingly shifting towards ``high-level'' visual sensemaking tasks, yet the exact nature of these tasks remains unclear and tacit. This survey paper addresses this ambiguity by systematically reviewing research on high-level visual understanding, focusing particularly on Abstract Concepts (ACs) in automatic image classification. Our survey contributes in three main ways: Firstly, it clarifies the tacit understanding of high-level semantics in CV through a multidisciplinary analysis, and categorization into distinct clusters, including commonsense, emotional, aesthetic, and inductive interpretative semantics. Secondly, it identifies and categorizes computer vision tasks associated with high-level visual sensemaking, offering insights into the diverse research areas within this domain. Lastly, it examines how abstract concepts such as values and ideologies are handled in CV, revealing challenges and opportunities in AC-based image classification. Notably, our survey of AC image classification tasks highlights persistent challenges, such as the limited efficacy of massive datasets and the importance of integrating supplementary information and mid-level features. We emphasize the growing relevance of hybrid AI systems in addressing the multifaceted nature of AC image classification tasks. Overall, this survey enhances our understanding of high-level visual reasoning in CV and lays the groundwork for future research endeavors., Comment: Preprint

Social concepts referring to non-physical objects--such as revolution, violence, or friendship--are powerful tools to describe, index, and query the content of visual data, including ever-growing collections of art images from the Cultural Heritage (CH) field. While much progress has been made towards complete image understanding in computer vision, automatic detection of social concepts evoked by images is still a challenge. This is partly due to the well-known semantic gap problem, worsened for social concepts given their lack of unique physical features, and reliance on more unspecific features than concrete concepts. In this paper, we propose the translation of recent cognitive theories about social concept representation into a software approach to represent them as multimodal frames, by integrating multisensory data. Our method focuses on the extraction, analysis, and integration of multimodal features from visual art material tagged with the concepts of interest. We define a conceptual model and present a novel ontology for formally representing social concepts as multimodal frames. Taking the Tate Gallery's collection as an empirical basis, we experiment our method on a corpus of art images to provide a proof of concept of its potential. We discuss further directions of research, and provide all software, data sources, and results., Comment: First International Workshop on Multisensory Data and Knowledge at the 3rd Conference on Language, Data and Knowledge (2021)