# In Defense of the Direct Perception of Affordances

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1505.01085 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.01085/

## Key facts

- Cited by 9 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 5 May 2015.

## Built on by (most cited first, 9 of 9)

- [Putting People in Their Place: Affordance-Aware Human Insertion into Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.14406/) (2023)
- [Grounded Affordance from Exocentric View](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.13196/) (2022)
- [The Functional Correspondence Problem](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.01097/) (2021)
- [DEFT: Dexterous Fine-Tuning for Real-World Hand Policies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.19797/) (2023)
- [Hallucinating Pose-Compatible Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.06909/) (2021)
- [Beyond Object Recognition: A New Benchmark towards Object Concept Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.02710/) (2022)
- [Text2Place: Affordance-aware Text Guided Human Placement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.15446/) (2024)
- [Affordance-Aware Object Insertion via Mask-Aware Dual Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.14462/) (2024)
- [Potential Field as Scene Affordance for Behavior Change-Based Visual Risk Object Identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.15846/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The field of functional recognition or affordance estimation from images has seen a revival in recent years. As originally proposed by Gibson, the affordances of a scene were directly perceived from the ambient light: in other words, functional properties like sittable were estimated directly from incoming pixels. Recent work, however, has taken a mediated approach in which affordances are derived by first estimating semantics or geometry and then reasoning about the affordances. In a tribute to Gibson, this paper explores his theory of affordances as originally proposed. We propose two approaches for direct perception of affordances and show that they obtain good results and can out-perform mediated approaches. We hope this paper can rekindle discussion around direct perception and its implications in the long term.