Recurrent Multimodal Interaction for Referring Image Segmentation

Chenxi Liu, Zhe Lin, Xiaohui Shen, Jimei Yang, Xin Lu, Alan Yuille; Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2017, pp. 1271-1280

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 show that our proposed model outperforms the baseline model on benchmark datasets. In addition, we analyze the intermediate output of the proposed multimodal LSTM approach and empirically explain how this approach enforces a more effective word-to-image interaction.