Proposal-free Temporal Moment Localization of a Natural-Language Query in Video using Guided Attention

Cristian Rodriguez, Edison Marrese-Taylor, Fatemeh Sadat Saleh, HONGDONG LI, Stephen Gould; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Winter Conference on Applications of Computer Vision (WACV), 2020, pp. 2464-2473

This paper studies the problem of temporal moment localization in a long untrimmed video using natural language as the query. Given an untrimmed video and a query sentence, the goal is to determine the start and end of the relevant visual moment in the video that corresponds to the query sentence. While most previous works have tackled this by a propose-and-rank approach, we introduce a more efficient, end-to-end trainable, and proposal-free approach that is built upon three key components: a dynamic filter which adaptively transfers language information to visual domain attention map, a new loss function to guide the model to attend the most relevant part of the video, and soft labels to cope with annotation uncertainties. Our method is evaluated on three standard benchmark datasets, Charades-STA, TACoS and ActivityNet-Captions. Experimental results show our method outperforms state-of-the-art methods on these datasets, confirming the effectiveness of the method. We believe the proposed dynamic filter-based guided attention mechanism will prove valuable for other vision and language tasks as well.