STVGBert: A Visual-linguistic Transformer based Framework for Spatio-temporal Video Grounding

Spatio-temporal video grounding (STVG) aims to localize a spatio-temporal tube of a target object in an untrimmed video based on a query sentence. In this work, we propose a one-stage visual-linguistic transformer based framework called STVGBert for the STVG task, which can simultaneously localize the target object in both spatial and temporal domains. Specifically, without resorting to pregenerated object proposals, our STVGBert directly takes a video and a query sentence as the input, and then produces the cross-modal features by using the newly introduced cross-modal feature learning module ST-ViLBert. Based on the cross-modal features, our method then generates bounding boxes and predicts the starting and ending frames to produce the predicted object tube. To the best of our knowledge, our STVGBert is the first one-stage method, which can handle the STVG task without relying on any pre-trained object detectors. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate our newly proposed framework outperforms the state-of-the-art multi-stage methods on two benchmark datasets Vid-STG and HC-STVG.