EPCFormer: Expression Prompt Collaboration Transformer for Universal Referring Video Object Segmentation

Audio-guided Video Object Segmentation (A-VOS) and Referring Video Object Segmentation (R-VOS) are two highly-related tasks, which both aim to segment specific objects from video sequences according to user-provided expression prompts. However, due to the challenges in modeling representations for different modalities, contemporary methods struggle to strike a balance between interaction flexibility and high-precision localization and segmentation. In this paper, we address this problem from two perspectives: the alignment representation of audio and text and the deep interaction among audio, text, and visual features. First, we propose a universal architecture, the Expression Prompt Collaboration Transformer, herein EPCFormer. Next, we propose an Expression Alignment (EA) mechanism for audio and text expressions. By introducing contrastive learning for audio and text expressions, the proposed EPCFormer realizes comprehension of the semantic equivalence between audio and text expressions denoting the same objects. Then, to facilitate deep interactions among audio, text, and video features, we introduce an Expression-Visual Attention (EVA) mechanism. The knowledge of video object segmentation in terms of the expression prompts can seamlessly transfer between the two tasks by deeply exploring complementary cues between text and audio. Experiments on well-recognized benchmarks demonstrate that our universal EPCFormer attains state-of-the-art results on both tasks. The source code of EPCFormer will be made publicly available at https://github.com/lab206/EPCFormer.

STURE: Spatial-Temporal Mutual Representation Learning for Robust Data Association in Online Multi-Object Tracking

Online multi-object tracking (MOT) is a longstanding task for computer vision and intelligent vehicle platform. At present, the main paradigm is tracking-by-detection, and the main difficulty of this paradigm is how to associate the current candidate detection with the historical tracklets. However, in the MOT scenarios, each historical tracklet is composed of an object sequence, while each candidate detection is just a flat image, which lacks the temporal features of the object sequence. The feature difference between current candidate detection and historical tracklets makes the object association much harder. Therefore, we propose a Spatial-Temporal Mutual {Representation} Learning (STURE) approach which learns spatial-temporal representations between current candidate detection and historical sequence in a mutual representation space. For the historical trackelets, the detection learning network is forced to match the representations of sequence learning network in a mutual representation space. The proposed approach is capable of extracting more distinguishing detection and sequence representations by using various designed losses in object association. As a result, spatial-temporal feature is learned mutually to reinforce the current detection features, and the feature difference can be relieved. To prove the robustness of the STURE, it is applied to the public MOT challenge benchmarks and performs well compared with various state-of-the-art online MOT trackers based on identity-preserving metrics.