Paper ID: 2307.10577

Ethosight: A Reasoning-Guided Iterative Learning System for Nuanced Perception based on Joint-Embedding & Contextual Label Affinity

Hugo Latapie, Shan Yu, Patrick Hammer, Kristinn R. Thorisson, Vahagn Petrosyan, Brandon Kynoch, Alind Khare, Payman Behnam, Alexey Tumanov, Aksheit Saxena, Anish Aralikatti, Hanning Chen, Mohsen Imani, Mike Archbold, Tangrui Li, Pei Wang, Justin Hart

Traditional computer vision models often necessitate extensive data acquisition, annotation, and validation. These models frequently struggle in real-world applications, resulting in high false positive and negative rates, and exhibit poor adaptability to new scenarios, often requiring costly retraining. To address these issues, we present Ethosight, a flexible and adaptable zero-shot video analytics system. Ethosight begins from a clean slate based on user-defined video analytics, specified through natural language or keywords, and leverages joint embedding models and reasoning mechanisms informed by ontologies such as WordNet and ConceptNet. Ethosight operates effectively on low-cost edge devices and supports enhanced runtime adaptation, thereby offering a new approach to continuous learning without catastrophic forgetting. We provide empirical validation of Ethosight's promising effectiveness across diverse and complex use cases, while highlighting areas for further improvement. A significant contribution of this work is the release of all source code and datasets to enable full reproducibility and to foster further innovation in both the research and commercial domains.

Submitted: Jul 20, 2023