Temporal Context Enhanced Referring Video Object Segmentation

Xiao Hu, Basavaraj Hampiholi, Heiko Neumann, Jochen Lang; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Winter Conference on Applications of Computer Vision (WACV), 2024, pp. 5574-5583

The goal of Referring Video Object Segmentation is to extract an object from a video clip based on a given expression. While previous methods have utilized the transformer's multi-modal learning capabilities to aggregate information from different modalities, they have mainly focused on spatial information and paid less attention to temporal information. To enhance the learning of temporal information, we propose TCE-RVOS with a novel frame token fusion (FTF) structure and a novel instance query transformer (IQT). Our technical innovations maximize the potential information gain of videos over single images. Our contributions also include a new classification of two widely used validation datasets for investigation of challenging cases. Our experimental results demonstrate that TCE-RVOS effectively captures temporal information and outperforms the previous state-of-the-art methods by increasing the J&F score by 4.0 and 1.9 points using ResNet-50 and VSwin-Tiny as the backbone on Ref-Youtube-VOS, respectively, and +2.0 mAP on A2D-Sentences dataset by using VSwin-Tiny backbone. The code is available at https://github.com/haliphinx/TCE-RVOS