@mastersthesis {xKazakos20, title = {Generation of Synthetic Referring Expressions for Object Segmentation in Videos}, year = {2020}, abstract = {

Integrating computer vision with natural language processing has achieved significant progress over the last years owing to the continuous evolution of deep learning. A novel vision and language task, which is tackled in the present Master thesis is referring video object segmentation, in which a language query defines which instance to segment from a video sequence. One of the biggest chal- lenges for this task is the lack of relatively large annotated datasets since a tremendous amount of time and human effort is required for annotation. Moreover, existing datasets suffer from poor qual- ity annotations in the sense that approximately one out of ten language expressions fails to uniquely describe the target object.

The purpose of the present Master thesis is to address these challenges by proposing a novel method for generating synthetic referring expressions for an image (video frame). This method pro- duces synthetic referring expressions by using only the ground-truth annotations of the objects as well as their attributes, which are detected by a state-of-the-art object detection deep neural network. One of the advantages of the proposed method is that its formulation allows its application to any object detection or segmentation dataset.

By using the proposed method, the first large-scale dataset with synthetic referring expressions for video object segmentation is created, based on an existing large benchmark dataset for video instance segmentation. A statistical analysis and comparison of the created synthetic dataset with existing ones is also provided in the present Master thesis.

The conducted experiments on three different datasets used for referring video object segmen- tation prove the efficiency of the generated synthetic data. More specifically, the obtained results demonstrate that by pre-training a deep neural network with the proposed synthetic dataset one can improve the ability of the network to generalize across different datasets, without any additional an- notation cost. This outcome is even more important taking into account that no additional annotation cost is involved.

}, author = {Kazakos, Ioannis}, editor = {Xavier Gir{\'o}-i-Nieto} }