  We describe a method for performing active localization of objects in
instances of visual situations. A visual situation is an abstract
concept---e.g., "a boxing match", "a birthday party", "walking the dog",
"waiting for a bus"---whose image instantiations are linked more by their
common spatial and semantic structure than by low-level visual similarity. Our
system combines given and learned knowledge of the structure of a particular
situation, and adapts that knowledge to a new situation instance as it actively
searches for objects. More specifically, the system learns a set of probability
distributions describing spatial and other relationships among relevant
objects. The system uses those distributions to iteratively sample object
proposals on a test image, but also continually uses information from those
object proposals to adaptively modify the distributions based on what the
system has detected. We test our approach's ability to efficiently localize
objects, using a situation-specific image dataset created by our group. We
compare the results with several baselines and variations on our method, and
demonstrate the strong benefit of using situation knowledge and active
context-driven localization. Finally, we contrast our method with several other
approaches that use context as well as active search for object localization in
images.
