In video captioning task, the best practice has been achieved by attention-based models which associate salient visual components with sentences in the video. However, existing study follows a common procedure which includes a frame-level appearance modeling and motion modeling on equal interval frame sampling, which may bring about redundant visual information, sensitivity to content noise and unnecessary computation cost. We propose a plug-and-play PickNet to perform informative frame picking in video captioning. Based on a standard encoder-decoder framework, we develop a reinforcement-learning-based procedure to train the network sequentially, where the reward of each frame picking action is designed by maximizing visual diversity and minimizing discrepancy between generated caption and the ground-truth. The rewarded candidate will be selected and the corresponding latent representation of encoder-decoder will be updated for future trials. This procedure goes on until the end of the video sequence. Consequently, a compact frame subset can be selected to represent the visual information and perform video captioning without performance degradation. Experiment results show that our model can achieve competitive performance across popular benchmarks while only 6–8 frames are used.
The main battle of studying how to select informative frames of videos is in the video summarization field. This problem may be formulated as image searching. For example, Song @cite_25 considered images related to the video title that can serve as a proxy for important visual concepts, so they developed a co-archetypal analysis technique that learns canonical visual concepts shared between video and images, and used it to summarize videos. Other people use sparse learning to deal with this problem. Zhao @cite_20 proposed to learn a dictionary from given video using group sparse coding, and the summary video was then generated by combining segments that cannot be sparsely reconstructed using the learned dictionary.
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Video summarization is a challenging problem in part because knowing which part of a video is important requires prior knowledge about its main topic. We present TVSum, an unsupervised video summarization framework that uses title-based image search results to find visually important shots. We observe that a video title is often carefully chosen to be maximally descriptive of its main topic, and hence images related to the title can serve as a proxy for important visual concepts of the main topic. However, because titles are free-formed, unconstrained, and often written ambiguously, images searched using the title can contain noise (images irrelevant to video content) and variance (images of different topics). To deal with this challenge, we developed a novel co-archetypal analysis technique that learns canonical visual concepts shared between video and images, but not in either alone, by finding a joint-factorial representation of two data sets. We introduce a new benchmark dataset, TVSum50, that contains 50 videos and their shot-level importance scores annotated via crowdsourcing. Experimental results on two datasets, SumMe and TVSum50, suggest our approach produces superior quality summaries compared to several recently proposed approaches. With the widespread availability of video cameras, we are facing an ever-growing enormous collection of unedited and unstructured video data. Due to lack of an automatic way to generate summaries from this large collection of consumer videos, they can be tedious and time consuming to index or search. In this work, we propose online video highlighting, a principled way of generating short video summarizing the most important and interesting contents of an unedited and unstructured video, costly both time-wise and financially for manual processing. Specifically, our method learns a dictionary from given video using group sparse coding, and updates atoms in the dictionary on-the-fly. A summary video is then generated by combining segments that cannot be sparsely reconstructed using the learned dictionary. The online fashion of our proposed method enables it to process arbitrarily long videos and start generating summaries before seeing the end of the video. Moreover, the processing time required by our proposed method is close to the original video length, achieving quasi real-time summarization speed. Theoretical analysis, together with experimental results on more than 12 hours of surveillance and YouTube videos are provided, demonstrating the effectiveness of online video highlighting.