We address the problem of video grounding from natural language queries. The key challenge in this task is that one training video might only contain a few annotated starting/ending frames that can be used as positive examples for model training. Most conventional approaches directly train a binary classifier using such imbalance data, thus achieving inferior results. The key idea of this paper is to use the distances between the frame within the ground truth and the starting (ending) frame as dense supervisions to improve the video grounding accuracy. Specifically, we design a novel dense regression network (DRN) to regress the distances from each frame to the starting (ending) frame of the video segment described by the query. We also propose a simple but effective IoU regression head module to explicitly consider the localization quality of the grounding results (i.e., the IoU between the predicted location and the ground truth). Experimental results show that our approach significantly outperforms state-of-the-arts on three datasets (i.e., Charades-STA, ActivityNet-Captions, and TACoS).
Technical University of Munich（慕尼黑工业大学）；Simon Fraser University（西蒙弗雷泽大学）
Recent studies on dense captioning and visual grounding in 3D have achieved impressive results. Despite developments in both areas, the limited amount of available 3D vision-language data causes overfitting issues for 3D visual grounding and 3D dense captioning methods. Also, how to discriminatively describe objects in complex 3D environments is not fully studied yet. To address these challenges, we present D3Net, an end-to-end neural speaker-listener architecture that can detect, describe and discriminate. Our D3Net unifies dense captioning and visual grounding in 3D in a self-critical manner…
Seoul National University（首尔国立大学）；Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute (ETRI)（电子与电信研究所（ETRI））
The key to successful grounding for video surveillance is to understand a semantic phrase corresponding to important actors and objects. Conventional methods ignore comprehensive contexts for the phrase or require heavy computation for multiple phrases. To understand comprehensive contexts with only one semantic phrase, we propose Position-aware Location Regression Network (PLRN) which exploits position-aware features of a query and a video. Specifically, PLRN first encodes both the video and query using positional information of words and video segments. Then, a semantic phrase feature is ext…
University of Southern California（南加州大学）；Institute for Robotics and Intelligent Systems（机器人与智能系统研究所）
Given a textual description of an image, phrase grounding localizes objects in the image referred by query phrases in the description. State-of-the-art methods address the problem by ranking a set of proposals based on the relevance to each query, which are limited by the performance of independent proposal generation systems and ignore useful cues from context in the description. In this paper, we adopt a spatial regression method to break the performance limit, and introduce reinforcement learning techniques to further leverage semantic context information. We propose a novel Query-guided Re…
Technical University of Munich（慕尼黑工业大学）；Meta AI；Simon Fraser University（西蒙菲莎大学）
Performing 3D dense captioning and visual grounding requires a common and shared understanding of the underlying multimodal relationships. However, despite some previous attempts on connecting these two related tasks with highly task-specific neural modules, it remains understudied how to explicitly depict their shared nature to learn them simultaneously. In this work, we propose UniT3D, a simple yet effective fully unified transformer-based architecture for jointly solving 3D visual grounding and dense captioning. UniT3D enables learning a strong multimodal representation across the two tasks…
Siamese Learning with Joint Alignment and Regression for Weakly-Supervised Video Paragraph Grounding
School of Computer Science and Engineering, Sun Yat-sen University（中山大学计算机科学与工程学院）；Guangdong Province Key Laboratory of Information Security Technology（广东省信息安全技术重点实验室）；Key Laboratory of Machine Intelligence and Advanced Computing, Ministry of Education（教育部机器智能与先进计算重点实验室）
INRIA-CentraleSupélec（法国国家信息与自动化研究所-中央理工-高等电力学院）；Imperial College London（帝国理工学院）；University College London（伦敦大学学院）
In this paper we propose to learn a mapping from image pixels into a dense template grid through a fully convolutional network. We formulate this task as a regression problem and train our network by leveraging upon manually annotated facial landmarks "in-the-wild". We use such landmarks to establish a dense correspondence field between a three-dimensional object template and the input image, which then serves as the ground-truth for training our regression system. We show that we can combine ideas from semantic segmentation with regression networks, yielding a highly-accurate "quantized regre…
ScreenParse: Moving Beyond Sparse Grounding with Complete Screen Parsing Supervision
IBM Research Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland（IBM苏黎世研究实验室，瑞士苏黎世）；ETH Zurich, Computer Vision（苏黎世联邦理工学院，计算机视觉）；ETH AI Center, Switzerland（苏黎世联邦理工学院人工智能中心，瑞士）；ETH Zurich, Photogrammetry（苏黎世联邦理工学院，摄影测量学）；Microsoft, Switzerland（微软公司，瑞士）
In this work we use deep learning to establish dense correspondences between a 3D object model and an image "in the wild". We introduce "DenseReg", a fully-convolutional neural network (F-CNN) that densely regresses at every foreground pixel a pair of U-V template coordinates in a single feedforward pass. To train DenseReg we construct a supervision signal by combining 3D deformable model fitting and 2D landmark annotations. We define the regression task in terms of the intrinsic, U-V coordinates of a 3D deformable model that is brought into correspondence with image instances at training time…
Phrase Grounding aims to detect and localize objects in images that are referred to and are queried by natural language phrases. Phrase grounding finds applications in tasks such as Visual Dialog, Visual Search and Image-text co-reference resolution. In this paper, we present a framework that leverages information such as phrase category, relationships among neighboring phrases in a sentence and context to improve the performance of phrase grounding systems. We propose three modules: Proposal Indexing Network(PIN); Inter-phrase Regression Network(IRN) and Proposal Ranking Network(PRN) each of …
We introduce Room-Across-Room (RxR), a new Vision-and-Language Navigation (VLN) dataset. RxR is multilingual (English, Hindi, and Telugu) and larger (more paths and instructions) than other VLN datasets. It emphasizes the role of language in VLN by addressing known biases in paths and eliciting more references to visible entities. Furthermore, each word in an instruction is time-aligned to the virtual poses of instruction creators and validators. We establish baseline scores for monolingual and multilingual settings and multitask learning when including Room-to-Room annotations. We also provid…
OmniVTG: A Large-Scale Dataset and Training Paradigm for Open-World Video Temporal Grounding
Wangxuan Institute of Computer Technology, Peking University（北京大学王轩计算机技术研究所）；State Key Laboratory of General Artificial Intelligence, Peking University（北京大学通用人工智能国家重点实验室）；Central Media Technology Institute, Huawei Technologies Ltd.（华为技术有限公司中央媒体技术研究所）；PKU-WUHAN Institute for Artificial Intelligence, Peking University（北京大学武汉人工智能研究所）
Baidu Inc.（百度公司）；Research Center for Social Computing and Information Retrieval, Harbin Institute of Technology（哈尔滨工业大学社会计算与信息检索研究中心）
The task of video grounding, which temporally localizes a natural language description in a video, plays an important role in understanding videos. Existing studies have adopted strategies of sliding window over the entire video or exhaustively ranking all possible clip-sentence pairs in a pre-segmented video, which inevitably suffer from exhaustively enumerated candidates. To alleviate this problem, we formulate this task as a problem of sequential decision making by learning an agent which regulates the temporal grounding boundaries progressively based on its policy. Specifically, we propose…
This paper addresses the problem of text-to-video temporal grounding, which aims to identify the time interval in a video semantically relevant to a text query. We tackle this problem using a novel regression-based model that learns to extract a collection of mid-level features for semantic phrases in a text query, which corresponds to important semantic entities described in the query (e.g., actors, objects, and actions), and reflect bi-modal interactions between the linguistic features of the query and the visual features of the video in multiple levels. The proposed method effectively predi…
ViGT: Proposal-free Video Grounding with Learnable Token in Transformer
Hefei University of Technology（合肥工业大学）；Key Laboratory of Knowledge Engineering with Big Data, Ministry of Education（教育部大数据知识工程重点实验室）；Intelligent Interconnected Systems Laboratory of Anhui Province（安徽省智能互联系统实验室）；Institute of Artificial Intelligence, Hefei Comprehensive National Science Center（合肥综合性国家科学中心人工智能研究院）
This paper presents a deep architecture for dense semantic correspondence, called pyramidal affine regression networks (PARN), that estimates locally-varying affine transformation fields across images. To deal with intra-class appearance and shape variations that commonly exist among different instances within the same object category, we leverage a pyramidal model where affine transformation fields are progressively estimated in a coarse-to-fine manner so that the smoothness constraint is naturally imposed within deep networks. PARN estimates residual affine transformations at each level and …
University of Zagreb, Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computing（萨格勒布大学电气工程与计算学院）；Rimac Automobili（里马茨汽车公司）
Dense semantic forecasting anticipates future events in video by inferring pixel-level semantics of an unobserved future image. We present a novel approach that is applicable to various single-frame architectures and tasks. Our approach consists of two modules. Feature-to-motion (F2M) module forecasts a dense deformation field that warps past features into their future positions. Feature-to-feature (F2F) module regresses the future features directly and is therefore able to account for emergent scenery. The compound F2MF model decouples the effects of motion from the effects of novelty in a ta…
The task of language-guided video temporal grounding is to localize the particular video clip corresponding to a query sentence in an untrimmed video. Though progress has been made continuously in this field, some issues still need to be resolved. First, most of the existing methods rely on the combination of multiple complicated modules to solve the task. Second, due to the semantic gaps between the two different modalities, aligning the information at different granularities (local and global) between the video and the language is significant, which is less addressed. Last, previous works do…
Zhejiang University（浙江大学）；Shanghai Institute for Advanced Study of Zhejiang University（浙江大学上海高等研究院）；Hikvision Research Institute（海康威视研究院）；Northwestern Polytechnical University（西北工业大学）；Shanghai AI Laboratory（上海人工智能实验室）
Natural language spatial video grounding aims to detect the relevant objects in video frames with descriptive sentences as the query. In spite of the great advances, most existing methods rely on dense video frame annotations, which require a tremendous amount of human effort. To achieve effective grounding under a limited annotation budget, we investigate one-shot video grounding, and learn to ground natural language in all video frames with solely one frame labeled, in an end-to-end manner. One major challenge of end-to-end one-shot video grounding is the existence of videos frames that are …
Three-dimensional face dense alignment and reconstruction in the wild is a challenging problem as partial facial information is commonly missing in occluded and large pose face images. Large head pose variations also increase the solution space and make the modeling more difficult. Our key idea is to model occlusion and pose to decompose this challenging task into several relatively more manageable subtasks. To this end, we propose an end-to-end framework, termed as Self-aligned Dual face Regression Network (SADRNet), which predicts a pose-dependent face, a pose-independent face. They are comb…
State Key Laboratory for Novel Software Technology, Nanjing University（南京大学计算机软件新技术国家重点实验室）
The classification and regression head are both indispensable components to build up a dense object detector, which are usually supervised by the same training samples and thus expected to have consistency with each other for detecting objects accurately in the detection pipeline. In this paper, we break the convention of the same training samples for these two heads in dense detectors and explore a novel supervisory paradigm, termed as Mutual Supervision (MuSu), to respectively and mutually assign training samples for the classification and regression head to ensure this consistency. MuSu def…
SynCLIP: Synonym-Coherent Language-Image Pretraining for Robust Open-Vocabulary Dense Perception
Beihang University（北京航空航天大学）；State Key Laboratory of Space Information System and Integrated Application（空间信息系统与集成应用国家重点实验室）；Nanjing University（南京大学）；Harbin Engineering University（哈尔滨工程大学）；Beijing Zhongguancun Academy（北京中关村科学城）
We present a simple and effective method for 3D hand pose estimation from a single depth frame. As opposed to previous state-of-the-art methods based on holistic 3D regression, our method works on dense pixel-wise estimation. This is achieved by careful design choices in pose parameterization, which leverages both 2D and 3D properties of depth map. Specifically, we decompose the pose parameters into a set of per-pixel estimations, i.e., 2D heat maps, 3D heat maps and unit 3D directional vector fields. The 2D/3D joint heat maps and 3D joint offsets are estimated via multi-task network cascades,…
Mixture models are well-established learning approaches that, in computer vision, have mostly been applied to inverse or ill-defined problems. However, they are general-purpose divide-and-conquer techniques, splitting the input space into relatively homogeneous subsets in a data-driven manner. Not only ill-defined but also well-defined complex problems should benefit from them. To this end, we devise a framework for spatial regression using mixture density networks. We realize the framework for object detection and human pose estimation. For both tasks, a mixture model yields higher accuracy a…
What, when, and where? -- Self-Supervised Spatio-Temporal Grounding in Untrimmed Multi-Action Videos from Narrated Instructions
Columbia University（哥伦比亚大学）；Goethe University Frankfurt（法兰克福大学）；University of Bonn（波恩大学）；MIT CSAIL（麻省理工学院计算机科学与人工智能实验室）；Quality Match GmbH（Quality Match有限公司）；IBM Research AI（IBM研究院人工智能部门）；MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab（麻省理工学院-IBM沃森人工智能实验室）
In recent years, geotagged social media has become popular as a novel source for geographic knowledge discovery. Ground-level images and videos provide a different perspective than overhead imagery and can be applied to a range of applications such as land use mapping, activity detection, pollution mapping, etc. The sparse and uneven distribution of this data presents a problem, however, for generating dense maps. We therefore investigate the problem of spatially interpolating the high-dimensional features extracted from sparse social media to enable dense labeling using standard classifiers. …
The Chinese University of Hong Kong（香港中文大学）；The University of Sydney（悉尼大学）；The University of Hong Kong（香港大学）；SenseTime Research（商汤科技研究院）
Estimating 3D mesh of the human body from a single 2D image is an important task with many applications such as augmented reality and Human-Robot interaction. However, prior works reconstructed 3D mesh from global image feature extracted by using convolutional neural network (CNN), where the dense correspondences between the mesh surface and the image pixels are missing, leading to suboptimal solution. This paper proposes a model-free 3D human mesh estimation framework, named DecoMR, which explicitly establishes the dense correspondence between the mesh and the local image features in the UV s…
Shanghai Jiao Tong University（上海交通大学）；CloudWalk Technology Co., Ltd（云从科技集团股份有限公司）；King Abdullah University of Science and Technology（阿卜杜拉国王科技大学）
Temporal language grounding in videos aims to localize the temporal span relevant to the given query sentence. Previous methods treat it either as a boundary regression task or a span extraction task. This paper will formulate temporal language grounding into video reading comprehension and propose a Relation-aware Network (RaNet) to address it. This framework aims to select a video moment choice from the predefined answer set with the aid of coarse-and-fine choice-query interaction and choice-choice relation construction. A choice-query interactor is proposed to match the visual and textual i…
