Following the recent progress in image classification and captioning using
deep learning, we develop a novel natural language person retrieval system
based on an attention mechanism. More specifically, given the description of a
person, the goal is to localize the person in an image. To this end, we first
construct a benchmark dataset for natural language person retrieval. To do so,
we generate bounding boxes for persons in a public image dataset from the
segmentation masks, which are then annotated with descriptions and attributes
using the Amazon Mechanical Turk. We then adopt a region proposal network in
Faster R-CNN as a candidate region generator. The cropped images based on the
region proposals as well as the whole images with attention weights are fed
into Convolutional Neural Networks for visual feature extraction, while the
natural language expression and attributes are input to Bidirectional Long
Short- Term Memory (BLSTM) models for text feature extraction. The visual and
text features are integrated to score region proposals, and the one with the
highest score is retrieved as the output of our system. The experimental
results show significant improvement over the state-of-the-art method for
generic object retrieval and this line of research promises to benefit search
in surveillance video footage.

本文提出了一个基于注意力机制的自然语言人物检索系统，并成功应用于监控视频检索领域中，该系统使用了 Faster R-CNN 中的候选区域生成器来提取视觉特征，并利用 BLSTM 模型进行文本特征提取，将其融合后进行得分，可以更加精确地检索到所需的目标。