Discovering states and transformations in image collections

Objects in visual scenes come in a rich variety of transformed states. A few classes of transformation have been heavily studied in computer vision: mostly simple, parametric changes in color and geometry. However, transformations in the physical world occur in many more flavors, and they come with semantic meaning: e.g., bending, folding, aging, etc. The transformations an object can undergo tell us about its physical and functional properties. In this paper, we introduce a dataset of objects, scenes, and materials, each of which is found in a variety of transformed states. Given a novel collection of images, we show how to explain the collection in terms of the states and transformations it depicts. Our system works by generalizing across object classes: states and transformations learned on one set of objects are used to interpret the image collection for an entirely new object class.