Exploring object-centric and scene-centric CNN features and their complementarity for human rights violations recognition in images

TL;DR

This paper introduces the HRA dataset and fine-tuned CNN models for recognizing human rights violations in images, demonstrating the challenge and potential of computer vision in human rights advocacy.

Contribution

It presents a new dataset, HRA, and a transfer learning approach to classify human rights violations, highlighting the complementarity of object and scene features.

Findings

HRA dataset contains 3050 annotated violation images.

Fine-tuned CNNs achieve promising classification performance.

Object and scene features together improve recognition accuracy.

Abstract

Identifying potential abuses of human rights through imagery is a novel and challenging task in the field of computer vision, that will enable to expose human rights violations over large-scale data that may otherwise be impossible. While standard databases for object and scene categorisation contain hundreds of different classes, the largest available dataset of human rights violations contains only 4 classes. Here, we introduce the `Human Rights Archive Database' (HRA), a verified-by-experts repository of 3050 human rights violations photographs, labelled with human rights semantic categories, comprising a list of the types of human rights abuses encountered at present. With the HRA dataset and a two-phase transfer learning scheme, we fine-tuned the state-of-the-art deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) to provide human rights violations classification CNNs (HRA-CNNs). We also present extensive experiments refined to evaluate how well object-centric and scene-centric CNN features can be combined for the task of recognising human rights abuses. With this, we show that HRA database poses a challenge at a higher level for the well studied representation learning methods, and provide a benchmark in the task of human rights violations recognition in visual context. We expect this dataset can help to open up new horizons on creating systems able of recognising rich information about human rights violations. Our dataset, codes and trained models are available online at https://github.com/GKalliatakis/Human-Rights-Archive-CNNs.