Interaction Detection Model for Identifying Human-Object Interactions in Image Content

Certain embodiments detect human-object interactions in image content. For example, human-object interaction metadata is applied to an input image, thereby identifying contact between a part of a depicted human and a part of a depicted object. Applying the human-object interaction metadata involves computing a joint-location heat map by applying a pose estimation subnet to the input image and a contact-point heat map by applying an object contact subnet to the to the input image. The human-object interaction metadata is generated by applying an interaction-detection subnet to the joint-location heat map and the contact-point heat map. The interaction-detection subnet is trained to identify an interaction based on joint-object contact pairs, where a joint-object contact pair includes a relationship between a human joint location and a contact point. An image search system or other computing system is provided with access to the input image having the human-object interaction metadata.