Referring Expression Comprehension: A Survey of Methods and Datasets

Referring expression comprehension (REC) aims to localize a target object in an image described by a referring expression phrased in natural language. Different from the object detection task that queried object labels have been pre-defined, the REC problem only can observe the queries during the test. It thus more challenging than a conventional computer vision problem. This task has attracted a lot of attention from both computer vision and natural language processing community, and several lines of work have been proposed, from CNN-RNN model, modular network to complex graph-based model. In this survey, we first examine the state of the art by comparing modern approaches to the problem. We classify methods by their mechanism to encode the visual and textual modalities. In particular, we examine the common approach of joint embedding images and expressions to a common feature space. We also discuss modular architectures and graph-based models that interface with structured graph representation. In the second part of this survey, we review the datasets available for training and evaluating REC systems. We then group results according to the datasets, backbone models, settings so that they can be fairly compared. Finally, we discuss promising future directions for the field, in particular the compositional referring expression comprehension that requires longer reasoning chain to address.Comment: Accepted to IEEE TM

What Goes beyond Multi-modal Fusion in One-stage Referring Expression Comprehension: An Empirical Study

Most of the existing work in one-stage referring expression comprehension (REC) mainly focuses on multi-modal fusion and reasoning, while the influence of other factors in this task lacks in-depth exploration. To fill this gap, we conduct an empirical study in this paper. Concretely, we first build a very simple REC network called SimREC, and ablate 42 candidate designs/settings, which covers the entire process of one-stage REC from network design to model training. Afterwards, we conduct over 100 experimental trials on three benchmark datasets of REC. The extensive experimental results not only show the key factors that affect REC performance in addition to multi-modal fusion, e.g., multi-scale features and data augmentation, but also yield some findings that run counter to conventional understanding. For example, as a vision and language (V&L) task, REC does is less impacted by language prior. In addition, with a proper combination of these findings, we can improve the performance of SimREC by a large margin, e.g., +27.12% on RefCOCO+, which outperforms all existing REC methods. But the most encouraging finding is that with much less training overhead and parameters, SimREC can still achieve better performance than a set of large-scale pre-trained models, e.g., UNITER and VILLA, portraying the special role of REC in existing V&L research

AttnGrounder: Talking to Cars with Attention

We propose Attention Grounder (AttnGrounder), a single-stage end-to-end trainable model for the task of visual grounding. Visual grounding aims to localize a specific object in an image based on a given natural language text query. Unlike previous methods that use the same text representation for every image region, we use a visual-text attention module that relates each word in the given query with every region in the corresponding image for constructing a region dependent text representation. Furthermore, for improving the localization ability of our model, we use our visual-text attention module to generate an attention mask around the referred object. The attention mask is trained as an auxiliary task using a rectangular mask generated with the provided ground-truth coordinates. We evaluate AttnGrounder on the Talk2Car dataset and show an improvement of 3.26% over the existing methods

RSVG: Exploring Data and Models for Visual Grounding on Remote Sensing Data

In this paper, we introduce the task of visual grounding for remote sensing data (RSVG). RSVG aims to localize the referred objects in remote sensing (RS) images with the guidance of natural language. To retrieve rich information from RS imagery using natural language, many research tasks, like RS image visual question answering, RS image captioning, and RS image-text retrieval have been investigated a lot. However, the object-level visual grounding on RS images is still under-explored. Thus, in this work, we propose to construct the dataset and explore deep learning models for the RSVG task. Specifically, our contributions can be summarized as follows. 1) We build the new large-scale benchmark dataset of RSVG, termed RSVGD, to fully advance the research of RSVG. This new dataset includes image/expression/box triplets for training and evaluating visual grounding models. 2) We benchmark extensive state-of-the-art (SOTA) natural image visual grounding methods on the constructed RSVGD dataset, and some insightful analyses are provided based on the results. 3) A novel transformer-based Multi-Level Cross-Modal feature learning (MLCM) module is proposed. Remotely-sensed images are usually with large scale variations and cluttered backgrounds. To deal with the scale-variation problem, the MLCM module takes advantage of multi-scale visual features and multi-granularity textual embeddings to learn more discriminative representations. To cope with the cluttered background problem, MLCM adaptively filters irrelevant noise and enhances salient features. In this way, our proposed model can incorporate more effective multi-level and multi-modal features to boost performance. Furthermore, this work also provides useful insights for developing better RSVG models. The dataset and code will be publicly available at https://github.com/ZhanYang-nwpu/RSVG-pytorch.Comment: 12 pages, 10 figure

Ref-NMS: Breaking Proposal Bottlenecks in Two-Stage Referring Expression Grounding

The prevailing framework for solving referring expression grounding is based on a two-stage process: 1) detecting proposals with an object detector and 2) grounding the referent to one of the proposals. Existing two-stage solutions mostly focus on the grounding step, which aims to align the expressions with the proposals. In this paper, we argue that these methods overlook an obvious mismatch between the roles of proposals in the two stages: they generate proposals solely based on the detection confidence (i.e., expression-agnostic), hoping that the proposals contain all right instances in the expression (i.e., expression-aware). Due to this mismatch, current two-stage methods suffer from a severe performance drop between detected and ground-truth proposals. To this end, we propose Ref-NMS, which is the first method to yield expression-aware proposals at the first stage. Ref-NMS regards all nouns in the expression as critical objects, and introduces a lightweight module to predict a score for aligning each box with a critical object. These scores can guide the NMS operation to filter out the boxes irrelevant to the expression, increasing the recall of critical objects, resulting in a significantly improved grounding performance. Since Ref- NMS is agnostic to the grounding step, it can be easily integrated into any state-of-the-art two-stage method. Extensive ablation studies on several backbones, benchmarks, and tasks consistently demonstrate the superiority of Ref-NMS. Codes are available at: https://github.com/ChopinSharp/ref-nms.Comment: Appear in AAAI 2021, Codes are available at: https://github.com/ChopinSharp/ref-nm

Advancing Visual Grounding with Scene Knowledge: Benchmark and Method

Visual grounding (VG) aims to establish fine-grained alignment between vision and language. Ideally, it can be a testbed for vision-and-language models to evaluate their understanding of the images and texts and their reasoning abilities over their joint space. However, most existing VG datasets are constructed using simple description texts, which do not require sufficient reasoning over the images and texts. This has been demonstrated in a recent study~\cite{luo2022goes}, where a simple LSTM-based text encoder without pretraining can achieve state-of-the-art performance on mainstream VG datasets. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a novel benchmark of \underline{S}cene \underline{K}nowledge-guided \underline{V}isual \underline{G}rounding (SK-VG), where the image content and referring expressions are not sufficient to ground the target objects, forcing the models to have a reasoning ability on the long-form scene knowledge. To perform this task, we propose two approaches to accept the triple-type input, where the former embeds knowledge into the image features before the image-query interaction; the latter leverages linguistic structure to assist in computing the image-text matching. We conduct extensive experiments to analyze the above methods and show that the proposed approaches achieve promising results but still leave room for improvement, including performance and interpretability. The dataset and code are available at \url{https://github.com/zhjohnchan/SK-VG}.Comment: Computer Vision and Natural Language Processing. 21 pages, 14 figures. CVPR-202