Few-shot Video Object Detection (FSVOD) addresses the challenge of detecting novel objects in videos with limited labeled examples, overcoming the constraints of traditional detection methods that require extensive training data. This task presents key challenges, including maintaining temporal consistency across frames affected by occlusion and appearance variations, and achieving novel object generalization without relying on complex region proposals, which are often computationally expensive and require task-specific training. Our novel object-aware temporal modeling approach addresses these challenges by incorporating a filtering mechanism that selectively propagates high-confidence object features across frames. This enables efficient feature progression, reduces noise accumulation, and enhances detection accuracy in a few-shot setting. By utilizing few-shot trained detection and classification heads with focused feature propagation, we achieve robust temporal consistency without depending on explicit object tube proposals. Our approach achieves performance gains, with AP improvements of 3.7% (FSVOD-500), 5.3% (FSYTV-40), 4.3% (VidOR), and 4.5% (VidVRD) in the 5-shot setting. Further results demonstrate improvements in 1-shot, 3-shot, and 10-shot configurations.

Video-to-video moment retrieval (Vid2VidMR) is the task of localizing unseen events or moments in a target video using a query video. This task poses several challenges, such as the need for semantic frame-level alignment and modeling complex dependencies between query and target videos. To tackle this challenging problem, we introduce MATR (Moment Alignment TRansformer), a transformer-based model designed to capture semantic context as well as the temporal details necessary for precise moment localization. MATR conditions target video representations on query video features using dual-stage sequence alignment that encodes the required correlations and dependencies. These representations are then used to guide foreground/background classification and boundary prediction heads, enabling the model to accurately identify moments in the target video that semantically match with the query video. Additionally, to provide a strong task-specific initialization for MATR, we propose a self-supervised pre-training technique that involves training the model to localize random clips within videos. Extensive experiments demonstrate that MATR achieves notable performance improvements of 13.1% in R@1 and 8.1% in mIoU on an absolute scale compared to state-of-the-art methods on the popular ActivityNet-VRL dataset. Additionally, on our newly proposed dataset, SportsMoments, MATR shows a 14.7% gain in R@1 and a 14.4% gain in mIoU on an absolute scale over strong baselines.

In this work, we study one-shot video object localization problem that aims to localize instances of unseen objects in the target video using a single query image of the object. Toward addressing this challenging problem, we extend a popular and successful object detection method, namely DETR (Detection Transformer), and introduce a novel approach –query-guided detection transformer for videos (QDETRv). A distinctive feature of QDETRv is its capacity to exploit information from the query image and spatio-temporal context of the target video, which significantly aids in precisely pinpointing the desired object in the video. We incorporate cross-attention mechanisms that capture temporal relationships across adjacent frames to handle the dynamic context in videos effectively. Further, to ensure strong initialization for QDETRv, we also introduce a novel unsupervised pretraining technique tailored to videos. This involves training our model on synthetic object trajectories with an analogous objective as the query-guided localization task. During this pretraining phase, we incorporate recurrent object queries and loss functions that encourage accurate patch feature reconstruction. These additions enable better temporal understanding and robust representation learning. Our experiments show that the proposed model significantly outperforms the competitive baselines on two public benchmarks, VidOR and ImageNet-VidVRD, extended for one-shot open-set localization tasks.

Interpreting visual relationships is a core aspect of comprehensive video understanding. Given a query visual relationship asand a test video, our objective is to localize the subject and object that are connected via the predicate. Given modern visio-lingual understanding capabilities, solving this problem is achievable, provided that there are large-scale annotated training examples available. However, annotating for every combination of subject, object, and predicate is cumbersome, expensive, and possibly infeasible. Therefore, there is a need for models that can learn to spatially and temporally localize subjects and objects that are connected via an unseen predicate using only a few support set videos sharing the common predicate. We address this challenging problem, referred to as few-shot referring relationships in videos for the first time. To this end, we pose the problem as a minimization of an objective function defined over a T-partite random field. Here, the vertices of the random field correspond to candidate bounding boxes for the subject and object, and T represents the number of frames in the test video. This objective function is composed of frame-level and visual relationship similarity potentials. To learn these potentials, we use a relation network that takes query-conditioned translational relationship embedding as inputs and is meta-trained using support set videos in an episodic manner. Further, the objective function is minimized using a belief propagation-based message passing on the random field to obtain the spatiotemporal localization or subject and object trajectories. We perform extensive experiments using two public benchmarks, namely ImageNet-VidVRD and VidOR, and compare the proposed approach with competitive baselines to assess its efficacy.