Video OWL-ViT: Temporally-consistent open-world localization in video
Georg Heigold Matthias Minderer Alexey Gritsenko Alex Bewley Daniel Keysers Mario Lučić Fisher Yu Thomas Kipf
We present an architecture and a training recipe that adapts pre-trained
open-world image models to localization in videos. Understanding the open
visual world (without being constrained by fixed label spaces) is crucial for
many real-world vision tasks. Contrastive pre-training on large image-text
datasets has recently led to significant improvements for image-level tasks.
For more structured tasks involving object localization applying pre-trained
models is more challenging. This is particularly true for video tasks, where
task-specific data is limited. We show successful transfer of open-world models
by building on the OWL-ViT open-vocabulary detection model and adapting it to
video by adding a transformer decoder. The decoder propagates object
representations recurrently through time by using the output tokens for one
frame as the object queries for the next. Our model is end-to-end trainable on
video data and enjoys improved temporal consistency compared to
tracking-by-detection baselines, while retaining the open-world capabilities of
the backbone detector. We evaluate our model on the challenging TAO-OW
benchmark and demonstrate that open-world capabilities, learned from
large-scale image-text pre-training, can be transferred successfully to
open-world localization across diverse videos.