T2SGrid: Temporal-to-Spatial Gridification for Video Temporal Grounding

TL;DR

T2SGrid introduces a novel approach to video temporal grounding by transforming temporal sequences into spatial grid images, improving temporal understanding and attention mechanisms in video analysis.

Contribution

The paper presents T2SGrid, a new framework that reformulates temporal understanding as spatial gridification, addressing limitations of existing methods in video temporal grounding.

Findings

Achieves superior performance on standard VTG benchmarks.

Effectively encodes temporal information through gridification.

Enhances local attention within video clips.

Abstract

Video Temporal Grounding (VTG) aims to localize the video segment that corresponds to a natural language query, which requires a comprehensive understanding of complex temporal dynamics. Existing Vision-LMMs typically perceive temporal dynamics via positional encoding, text-based timestamps, or visual frame numbering. However, these approaches exhibit notable limitations: assigning each frame a text-based timestamp token introduces additional computational overhead and leads to sparsity in visual attention, positional encoding struggles to capture absolute temporal information, and visual frame numbering often compromises spatial detail. To address these issues, we propose Temporal to Spatial Gridification (T2SGrid), a novel framework that reformulates video temporal understanding as a spatial understanding task. The core idea of T2SGrid is to process video content in clips rather than individual frames. we employ a overlapping sliding windows mechanism to segment the video into temporal clips. Within each window, frames are arranged chronologically in a row-major order into a composite grid image, effectively transforming temporal sequences into structured 2D layouts. The gridification not only encodes temporal information but also enhances local attention within each grid. Furthermore, T2SGrid enables the use of composite text timestamps to establish global temporal awareness. Experiments on standard VTG benchmarks demonstrate that T2SGrid achieves superior performance.