  We aim to address the problem of Natural Language Video Localization
(NLVL)-localizing the video segment corresponding to a natural language
description in a long and untrimmed video. State-of-the-art NLVL methods are
almost in one-stage fashion, which can be typically grouped into two
categories: 1) anchor-based approach: it first pre-defines a series of video
segment candidates (e.g., by sliding window), and then does classification for
each candidate; 2) anchor-free approach: it directly predicts the probabilities
for each video frame as a boundary or intermediate frame inside the positive
segment. However, both kinds of one-stage approaches have inherent drawbacks:
the anchor-based approach is susceptible to the heuristic rules, further
limiting the capability of handling videos with variant length. While the
anchor-free approach fails to exploit the segment-level interaction thus
achieving inferior results. In this paper, we propose a novel Boundary Proposal
Network (BPNet), a universal two-stage framework that gets rid of the issues
mentioned above. Specifically, in the first stage, BPNet utilizes an
anchor-free model to generate a group of high-quality candidate video segments
with their boundaries. In the second stage, a visual-language fusion layer is
proposed to jointly model the multi-modal interaction between the candidate and
the language query, followed by a matching score rating layer that outputs the
alignment score for each candidate. We evaluate our BPNet on three challenging
NLVL benchmarks (i.e., Charades-STA, TACoS and ActivityNet-Captions). Extensive
experiments and ablative studies on these datasets demonstrate that the BPNet
outperforms the state-of-the-art methods.
