Spatio-Temporal Data Enhanced Vision-Language Model for Traffic Scene Understanding

Nowadays, navigation and ride-sharing apps have collected numerous images with spatio-temporal data. A core technology for analyzing such images, associated with spatio-temporal information, is Traffic Scene Understanding (TSU), which aims to provide a comprehensive description of the traffic scene. Unlike traditional spatio-temporal data analysis tasks, the dependence on both spatio-temporal and visual-textual data introduces distinct challenges to TSU task. However, recent research often treats TSU as a common image understanding task, ignoring the spatio-temporal information and overlooking the interrelations between different aspects of the traffic scene. To address these issues, we propose a novelSpatio-Temporal Enhanced Model based on CILP(ST-CLIP) for TSU. Our model uses the classic vision-language model, CLIP, as the backbone, and designs a Spatio-temporal Context Aware Multi-aspect Prompt (SCAMP) learning method to incorporate spatio-temporal information into TSU. The prompt learning method consists of two components: A dynamic spatio-temporal context representation module that extracts representation vectors of spatio-temporal data for each traffic scene image, and a bi-level ST-aware multi-aspect prompt learning module that integrates the ST-context representation vectors into word embeddings of prompts for the CLIP model. The second module also extracts low-level visual features and image-wise high-level semantic features to exploit interactive relations among different aspects of traffic scenes. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first attempt to integrate spatio-temporal information into vision-language models to facilitate TSU task. Experiments on two real-world datasets demonstrate superior performance in the complex scene understanding scenarios with a few-shot learning strategy.