Bi-Directional Relationship Inferring Network for Referring Image Segmentation

Zhiwei Hu, Guang Feng, Jiayu Sun, Lihe Zhang, Huchuan Lu

Most existing methods do not explicitly formulate the mutual guidance between vision and language. In this work, we propose a bi-directional relationship inferring network (BRINet) to model the dependencies of cross-modal information. In detail, the vision-guided linguistic attention is used to learn the adaptive linguistic context corresponding to each visual region. Combining with the language-guided visual attention, a bi-directional cross-modal attention module (BCAM) is built to learn the relationship between multi-modal features. Thus, the ultimate semantic context of the target object and referring expression can be represented accurately and consistently. Moreover, a gated bi-directional fusion module (GBFM) is designed to integrate the multi-level features where a gate function is used to guide the bi-directional flow of multi-level information. Extensive experiments on four benchmark datasets demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms other state-of-the-art methods under different evaluation metrics.