Prompt guidance query with cascaded constraint decoders for human–object interaction detection

Human–object interaction (HOI) detection, which localises and recognises interactions between human and object, requires high-level image and scene understanding. Recent methods for HOI detection typically utilise transformer-based architecture to build unified future representation. However, these methods use random initial queries to predict interactive human–object pairs, leading to a lack of prior knowledge. Furthermore, most methods provide unified features to forecast interactions using conventional decoder structures, but they lack the ability to build efficient multi-task representations. To address these problems, we propose a novel two-stage HOI detector called PGCD, mainly consisting of prompt guidance query and cascaded constraint decoders. Firstly, the authors propose a novel prompt guidance query generation module (PGQ) to introduce the guidance-semantic features. In PGQ, the authors build visual-semantic transfer to obtain fuller semantic representations. In addition, a cascaded constraint decoder architecture (CD) with random masks is designed to build fine-grained interaction features and improve the model's generalisation performance. Experimental results demonstrate that the authors’ proposed approach obtains significant performance on the two widely used benchmarks, that is, HICO-DET and V-COCO.