See, Rank, and Filter: Important Word-Aware Clip Filtering via Scene Understanding for Moment Retrieval and Highlight Detection

Video moment retrieval (MR) and highlight detection (HD) with natural language queries aim to localize relevant moments and key highlights in a video clips. However, existing methods overlook the importance of individual words, treating the entire text query and video clips as a black-box, which hinders contextual understanding. In this paper, we propose a novel approach that enables fine-grained clip filtering by identifying and prioritizing important words in the query. Our method integrates image-text scene understanding through Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) and enhances the semantic understanding of video clips. We introduce a feature enhancement module (FEM) to capture important words from the query and a ranking-based filtering module (RFM) to iteratively refine video clips based on their relevance to these important words. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach significantly outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods, achieving superior performance in both MR and HD tasks.