Referring video object segmentation (R-VOS) is an emerging cross-modal task that aims to segment the target object referred by a language expression in all video frames. In this work, we propose a simple and unified framework built upon Transformer, termed ReferFormer. It views the language as queries and directly attends to the most relevant regions in the video frames. Concretely, we introduce a small set of object queries conditioned on the language as the input to the Transformer. In this manner, all the queries are obligated to find the referred objects only. They are eventually transformed into dynamic kernels which capture the crucial object-level information, and play the role of convolution filters to generate the segmentation masks from feature maps. The object tracking is achieved naturally by linking the corresponding queries across frames. This mechanism greatly simplifies the pipeline and the end-to-end framework is significantly different from the previous methods. Extensive experiments on Ref-Youtube-VOS, Ref-DAVIS17, A2D-Sentences and JHMDB-Sentences show the effectiveness of ReferFormer. On Ref-Youtube-VOS, Refer-Former achieves 55.6J&F with a ResNet-50 backbone without bells and whistles, which exceeds the previous state-of-the-art performance by 8.4 points. In addition, with the strong Swin-Large backbone, ReferFormer achieves the best J&F of 64.2 among all existing methods. Moreover, we show the impressive results of 55.0 mAP and 43.7 mAP on A2D-Sentences andJHMDB-Sentences respectively, which significantly outperforms the previous methods by a large margin. Code is publicly available at https://github.com/wjn922/ReferFormer.
Referring Video Object Segmentation with Cross-Modality Proxy Queries
DUT-RU International School of Information Science & Engineering, Dalian University of Technology, China（大连理工大学国际信息科学与工程学院，中国）；Chinese University of Hong Kong, China（香港中文大学，中国）；University of Sydney, Australia（悉尼大学，澳大利亚）
SVAC: Scaling Is All You Need For Referring Video Object Segmentation
Columbia University New York, USA（哥伦比亚大学）；Carnegie Mellon University Pittsburgh, USA（卡内基梅隆大学）；New York University New York, USA（纽约大学）；Wuhan University Wuhan, China（武汉大学）
HopaDIFF: Holistic-Partial Aware Fourier Conditioned Diffusion for Referring Human Action Segmentation in Multi-Person Scenarios
Karlsruhe Institute of Technology（卡尔斯鲁厄理工学院）；Beijing Institute of Technology（北京理工大学）；Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院自动化研究所）；Hunan University（湖南大学）；Shanghai AI Lab（上海人工智能实验室）；HEBUST
Progressive Prompt-Guided Cross-Modal Reasoning for Referring Image Segmentation
School of Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence, Wuhan University of Technology（武汉理工大学计算机科学与人工智能学院）；School of Artificial Intelligence and Automation, Huazhong University of Science and Technology（华中科技大学人工智能与自动化学院）；University of Electronic Science and Technology of China（电子科技大学）；Wuhan Vocational College of Software and Engineering（武汉软件工程职业学院）
In this work, we address the challenging task of referring segmentation. The query expression in referring segmentation typically indicates the target object by describing its relationship with others. Therefore, to find the target one among all instances in the image, the model must have a holistic understanding of the whole image. To achieve this, we reformulate referring segmentation as a direct attention problem: finding the region in the image where the query language expression is most attended to. We introduce transformer and multi-head attention to build a network with an encoder-decod…
Referring segmentation aims to generate a segmentation mask for the target instance indicated by a natural language expression. There are typically two kinds of existing methods: one-stage methods that directly perform segmentation on the fused vision and language features; and two-stage methods that first utilize an instance segmentation model for instance proposal and then select one of these instances via matching them with language features. In this work, we propose a novel framework that simultaneously detects the target-of-interest via feature propagation and generates a fine-grained seg…
Johns Hopkins University（约翰斯·霍普金斯大学）；AWS AI Labs（AWS人工智能实验室）
In this work, instead of directly predicting the pixel-level segmentation masks, the problem of referring image segmentation is formulated as sequential polygon generation, and the predicted polygons can be later converted into segmentation masks. This is enabled by a new sequence-to-sequence framework, Polygon Transformer (PolyFormer), which takes a sequence of image patches and text query tokens as input, and outputs a sequence of polygon vertices autoregressively. For more accurate geometric localization, we propose a regression-based decoder, which predicts the precise floating-point coord…
Tomorrow Advancing Life (TAL) Education Group（好未来教育集团）
The task of referring video object segmentation aims to segment the object in the frames of a given video to which the referring expressions refer. Previous methods adopt multi-stage approach and design complex pipelines to obtain promising results. Recently, the end-to-end method based on Transformer has proved its superiority. In this work, we draw on the advantages of the above methods to provide a simple and effective pipeline for RVOS. Firstly, We improve the state-of-the-art one-stage method ReferFormer to obtain mask sequences that are strongly correlated with language descriptions. Sec…
We investigate Referring Image Segmentation (RIS), which outputs a segmentation map corresponding to the natural language description. Addressing RIS efficiently requires considering the interactions happening across visual and linguistic modalities and the interactions within each modality. Existing methods are limited because they either compute different forms of interactions sequentially (leading to error propagation) or ignore intramodal interactions. We address this limitation by performing all three interactions simultaneously through a Synchronous Multi-Modal Fusion Module (SFM). Moreo…
Image segmentation from referring expressions is a joint vision and language modeling task, where the input is an image and a textual expression describing a particular region in the image; and the goal is to localize and segment the specific image region based on the given expression. One major difficulty to train such language-based image segmentation systems is the lack of datasets with joint vision and text annotations. Although existing vision datasets such as MS COCO provide image captions, there are few datasets with region-level textual annotations for images, and these are often small…
Wenzhou University（温州大学）；University of Manitoba（曼尼托巴大学）；Shanghai Institute for Advanced Communication and Data Science（上海先进通信与数据科学研究院）；Shanghai University（上海大学）
We consider the problem of referring segmentation in images and videos with natural language. Given an input image (or video) and a referring expression, the goal is to segment the entity referred by the expression in the image or video. In this paper, we propose a cross-modal self-attention (CMSA) module to utilize fine details of individual words and the input image or video, which effectively captures the long-range dependencies between linguistic and visual features. Our model can adaptively focus on informative words in the referring expression and important regions in the visual input. W…
Referring image segmentation aims to segment the image region of interest according to the given language expression, which is a typical multi-modal task. Existing methods either adopt the pixel classification-based or the learnable query-based framework for mask generation, both of which are insufficient to deal with various text-image pairs with a fix number of parametric prototypes. In this work, we propose an end-to-end framework built on transformer to perform Linguistic query-Guided mask generation, dubbed LGFormer. It views the linguistic features as query to generate a specialized prot…
University of Manitoba（曼尼托巴大学）；Shanghai University（上海大学）
We consider referring image segmentation. It is a problem at the intersection of computer vision and natural language understanding. Given an input image and a referring expression in the form of a natural language sentence, the goal is to segment the object of interest in the image referred by the linguistic query. To this end, we propose a dual convolutional LSTM (ConvLSTM) network to tackle this problem. Our model consists of an encoder network and a decoder network, where ConvLSTM is used in both encoder and decoder networks to capture spatial and sequential information. The encoder networ…
Referring Expression Segmentation (RES), which is aimed at localizing and segmenting the target according to the given language expression, has drawn increasing attention. Existing methods jointly consider the localization and segmentation steps, which rely on the fused visual and linguistic features for both steps. We argue that the conflict between the purpose of identifying an object and generating a mask limits the RES performance. To solve this problem, we propose a parallel position-kernel-segmentation pipeline to better isolate and then interact the localization and segmentation steps. …
Few-Shot Referring Video Single- and Multi-Object Segmentation via Cross-Modal Affinity with Instance Sequence Matching
School of Computer Science and Technology, Anhui University of Technology（安徽工业大学计算机科学与技术学院）；Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Southern University of Science and Technology（南方科技大学计算机科学与工程系）；School of Computer Science and Information Engineering, Hefei University of Technology（合肥工业大学计算机与信息工程学院）
Referring image segmentation aims to segment the objects referred by a natural language expression. Previous methods usually focus on designing an implicit and recurrent feature interaction mechanism to fuse the visual-linguistic features to directly generate the final segmentation mask without explicitly modeling the localization information of the referent instances. To tackle these problems, we view this task from another perspective by decoupling it into a "Locate-Then-Segment" (LTS) scheme. Given a language expression, people generally first perform attention to the corresponding target i…
OneRef: Unified One-tower Expression Grounding and Segmentation with Mask Referring Modeling
Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院自动化研究所）；Pengcheng Laboratory（鹏城实验室）；School of Artificial Intelligence, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学人工智能学院）；Harbin Institute of Technology (Shenzhen)（哈尔滨工业大学（深圳））
In this paper we are interested in the problem of image segmentation given natural language descriptions, i.e. referring expressions. Existing works tackle this problem by first modeling images and sentences independently and then segment images by combining these two types of representations. We argue that learning word-to-image interaction is more native in the sense of jointly modeling two modalities for the image segmentation task, and we propose convolutional multimodal LSTM to encode the sequential interactions between individual words, visual information, and spatial information. We sho…
Academia Sinica（中央研究院）；NEC Laboratories America（美国NEC实验室）；University of California, Merced（加州大学默塞德分校）；Google Cloud（谷歌云）
Referring expressions are natural language descriptions that identify a particular object within a scene and are widely used in our daily conversations. In this work, we focus on segmenting the object in an image specified by a referring expression. To this end, we propose an end-to-end trainable comprehension network that consists of the language and visual encoders to extract feature representations from both domains. We introduce the spatial-aware dynamic filters to transfer knowledge from text to image, and effectively capture the spatial information of the specified object. To better comm…
Key Laboratory of Multimedia Trusted Perception and Efficient Computing, Ministry of Education of China, Xiamen University（中国教育部多媒体可信感知与高效计算重点实验室，厦门大学）；Youtu Lab, Tencent, P.R. China（腾讯视频实验室，中国）；OpenGVLab, Shanghai AI Laboratory（上海AI实验室）
We propose a Vision-Language Transformer (VLT) framework for referring segmentation to facilitate deep interactions among multi-modal information and enhance the holistic understanding to vision-language features. There are different ways to understand the dynamic emphasis of a language expression, especially when interacting with the image. However, the learned queries in existing transformer works are fixed after training, which cannot cope with the randomness and huge diversity of the language expressions. To address this issue, we propose a Query Generation Module, which dynamically produc…
CausalCLIPSeg: Unlocking CLIP's Potential in Referring Medical Image Segmentation with Causal Intervention
Wuhan University of Technology（武汉理工大学）；Shanghai Artificial Intelligence Laboratory（上海人工智能实验室）；MedAI Technology (Wuxi) Co. Ltd.（MedAI科技（无锡）有限公司）；Technical University of Munich（慕尼黑工业大学）
Proxy-Embedding as an Adversarial Teacher: An Embedding-Guided Bidirectional Attack for Referring Expression Segmentation Models
National Pilot School of Software, Yunnan University（云南大学软件试点学校）；School of Information Science and Engineering, Yunnan University（云南大学信息科学与工程学院）；Institute of Data Science, National University of Singapore（新加坡国立大学数据科学研究所）
Referring video segmentation aims to segment the corresponding video object described by the language expression. To address this task, we first design a two-stream encoder to extract CNN-based visual features and transformer-based linguistic features hierarchically, and a vision-language mutual guidance (VLMG) module is inserted into the encoder multiple times to promote the hierarchical and progressive fusion of multi-modal features. Compared with the existing multi-modal fusion methods, this two-stream encoder takes into account the multi-granularity linguistic context, and realizes the dee…
Barcelona Supercomputing Center（巴塞罗那超级计算中心）；Universitat Oberta de Catalunya（加泰罗尼亚开放大学）；Institute for NLP, University of Stuttgart（斯图加特大学自然语言处理研究所）；Universitat Pompeu Fabra（庞培法布拉大学）；National Technical University of Athens（雅典国立技术大学）；Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya（加泰罗尼亚理工大学）
The task of video object segmentation with referring expressions (language-guided VOS) is to, given a linguistic phrase and a video, generate binary masks for the object to which the phrase refers. Our work argues that existing benchmarks used for this task are mainly composed of trivial cases, in which referents can be identified with simple phrases. Our analysis relies on a new categorization of the phrases in the DAVIS-2017 and Actor-Action datasets into trivial and non-trivial REs, with the non-trivial REs annotated with seven RE semantic categories. We leverage this data to analyze the re…
Recently, referring image segmentation has aroused widespread interest. Previous methods perform the multi-modal fusion between language and vision at the decoding side of the network. And, linguistic feature interacts with visual feature of each scale separately, which ignores the continuous guidance of language to multi-scale visual features. In this work, we propose an encoder fusion network (EFN), which transforms the visual encoder into a multi-modal feature learning network, and uses language to refine the multi-modal features progressively. Moreover, a co-attention mechanism is embedded…
Max Planck Institute for Informatics（马克斯·普朗克信息研究所）；Bosch Center for Artificial Intelligence（博世人工智能中心）；University of California, Berkeley（加利福尼亚大学伯克利分校）
Most state-of-the-art semi-supervised video object segmentation methods rely on a pixel-accurate mask of a target object provided for the first frame of a video. However, obtaining a detailed segmentation mask is expensive and time-consuming. In this work we explore an alternative way of identifying a target object, namely by employing language referring expressions. Besides being a more practical and natural way of pointing out a target object, using language specifications can help to avoid drift as well as make the system more robust to complex dynamics and appearance variations. Leveraging…
