Bidirectional Correlation-Driven Inter-Frame Interaction Transformer for Referring Video Object Segmentation

Abstract: Referring video object segmentation (RVOS) aims to segment the target object in a video sequence described by a language expression. Typical multimodal Transformer based RVOS approaches process video sequence in a frame-independent manner to reduce the high computational cost, which however restricts the performance due to the lack of inter-frame interaction for temporal coherence modeling and spatio-temporal representation learning of the referred object. Besides, the absence of sufficient cross-modal interactions results in weak correlation between the visual and linguistic features, which increases the difficulty of decoding the target information and limits the performance of the model. In this paper, we propose a bidirectional correlation-driven inter-frame interaction Transformer, dubbed BIFIT, to address these issues in RVOS. Specifically, we design a lightweight and plug-and-play inter-frame interaction module in the Transformer decoder to efficiently learn the spatio-temporal features of the referred object, so as to decode the object information in the video sequence more precisely and generate more accurate segmentation results. Moreover, a bidirectional vision-language interaction module is implemented before the multimodal Transformer to enhance the correlation between the visual and linguistic features, thus facilitating the language queries to decode more precise object information from visual features and ultimately improving the segmentation performance. Extensive experimental results on four benchmarks validate the superiority of our BIFIT over state-of-the-art methods and the effectiveness of our proposed modules.