Referring Expression Comprehension: A Survey of Methods and Datasets

Understand

Referring expression comprehension (REC) aims to localize a target object in an image described by a referring expression phrased in natural language.

• Different from the object detection task that queried object labels have been pre-defined, the REC problem only can observe the queries during the test.
• It thus more challenging than a conventional computer vision problem.
• This task has attracted a lot of attention from both computer vision and natural language processing community, and several lines of work have been proposed, from CNN-RNN model, modular network to complex graph-based model.