This paper focuses on a novel and challenging vision task, dense video captioning, which aims to automatically describe a video clip with multiple informative and diverse caption sentences. The proposed method is trained without explicit annotation of fine-grained sentence to video region-sequence correspondence, but is only based on weak video-level sentence annotations. It differs from existing video captioning systems in three technical aspects. First, we propose lexical fully convolutional neural networks (Lexical-FCN) with weakly supervised multi-instance multi-label learning to weakly link video regions with lexical labels. Second, we introduce a novel submodular maximization scheme to generate multiple informative and diverse region-sequences based on the Lexical-FCN outputs. A winner-takes-all scheme is adopted to weakly associate sentences to region-sequences in the training phase. Third, a sequence-to-sequence learning based language model is trained with the weakly supervised information obtained through the association process. We show that the proposed method can not only produce informative and diverse dense captions, but also outperform state-of-the-art single video captioning methods by a large margin.
Real-world videos often have complex dynamics; and methods for generating open-domain video descriptions should be sensitive to temporal structure and allow both input (sequence of frames) and output (sequence of words) of variable length. To approach this problem, we propose a novel end-to-end sequence-to-sequence model to generate captions for videos. For this we exploit recurrent neural networks, specifically LSTMs, which have demonstrated state-of-the-art performance in image caption generation. Our LSTM model is trained on video-sentence pairs and learns to associate a sequence of video frames to a sequence of words in order to generate a description of the event in the video clip. Our model naturally is able to learn the temporal structure of the sequence of frames as well as the sequence model of the generated sentences, i.e. a language model. We evaluate several variants of our model that exploit different visual features on a standard set of YouTube videos and two movie description datasets (M-VAD and MPII-MD).  While there has been increasing interest in the task of describing video with natural language, current computer vision algorithms are still severely limited in terms of the variability and complexity of the videos and their associated language that they can recognize. This is in part due to the simplicity of current benchmarks, which mostly focus on specific fine-grained domains with limited videos and simple descriptions. While researchers have provided several benchmark datasets for image captioning, we are not aware of any large-scale video description dataset with comprehensive categories yet diverse video content. In this paper we present MSR-VTT (standing for "MSRVideo to Text") which is a new large-scale video benchmark for video understanding, especially the emerging task of translating video to text. This is achieved by collecting 257 popular queries from a commercial video search engine, with 118 videos for each query. In its current version, MSR-VTT provides 10K web video clips with 41.2 hours and 200K clip-sentence pairs in total, covering the most comprehensive categories and diverse visual content, and representing the largest dataset in terms of sentence and vocabulary. Each clip is annotated with about 20 natural sentences by 1,327 AMT workers. We present a detailed analysis of MSR-VTT in comparison to a complete set of existing datasets, together with a summarization of different state-of-the-art video-to-text approaches. We also provide an extensive evaluation of these approaches on this dataset, showing that the hybrid Recurrent Neural Networkbased approach, which combines single-frame and motion representations with soft-attention pooling strategy, yields the best generalization capability on MSR-VTT. Automatically describing video content with natural language is a fundamental challenge of computer vision. Re-current Neural Networks (RNNs), which models sequence dynamics, has attracted increasing attention on visual interpretation. However, most existing approaches generate a word locally with the given previous words and the visual content, while the relationship between sentence semantics and visual content is not holistically exploited. As a result, the generated sentences may be contextually correct but the semantics (e.g., subjects, verbs or objects) are not true. This paper presents a novel unified framework, named Long Short-Term Memory with visual-semantic Embedding (LSTM-E), which can simultaneously explore the learning of LSTM and visual-semantic embedding. The former aims to locally maximize the probability of generating the next word given previous words and visual content, while the latter is to create a visual-semantic embedding space for enforcing the relationship between the semantics of the entire sentence and visual content. The experiments on YouTube2Text dataset show that our proposed LSTM-E achieves to-date the best published performance in generating natural sentences: 45.3 and 31.0 in terms of BLEU@4 and METEOR, respectively. Superior performances are also reported on two movie description datasets (M-VAD and MPII-MD). In addition, we demonstrate that LSTM-E outperforms several state-of-the-art techniques in predicting Subject-Verb-Object (SVO) triplets. Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) are powerful models that have achieved excellent performance on difficult learning tasks. Although DNNs work well whenever large labeled training sets are available, they cannot be used to map sequences to sequences. In this paper, we present a general end-to-end approach to sequence learning that makes minimal assumptions on the sequence structure. Our method uses a multilayered Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) to map the input sequence to a vector of a fixed dimensionality, and then another deep LSTM to decode the target sequence from the vector. Our main result is that on an English to French translation task from the WMT'14 dataset, the translations produced by the LSTM achieve a BLEU score of 34.8 on the entire test set, where the LSTM's BLEU score was penalized on out-of-vocabulary words. Additionally, the LSTM did not have difficulty on long sentences. For comparison, a phrase-based SMT system achieves a BLEU score of 33.3 on the same dataset. When we used the LSTM to rerank the 1000 hypotheses produced by the aforementioned SMT system, its BLEU score increases to 36.5, which is close to the previous best result on this task. The LSTM also learned sensible phrase and sentence representations that are sensitive to word order and are relatively invariant to the active and the passive voice. Finally, we found that reversing the order of the words in all source sentences (but not target sentences) improved the LSTM's performance markedly, because doing so introduced many short term dependencies between the source and the target sentence which made the optimization problem easier. Recent progress in using recurrent neural networks (RNNs) for image description has motivated the exploration of their application for video description. However, while images are static, working with videos requires modeling their dynamic temporal structure and then properly integrating that information into a natural language description. In this context, we propose an approach that successfully takes into account both the local and global temporal structure of videos to produce descriptions. First, our approach incorporates a spatial temporal 3-D convolutional neural network (3-D CNN) representation of the short temporal dynamics. The 3-D CNN representation is trained on video action recognition tasks, so as to produce a representation that is tuned to human motion and behavior. Second we propose a temporal attention mechanism that allows to go beyond local temporal modeling and learns to automatically select the most relevant temporal segments given the text-generating RNN. Our approach exceeds the current state-of-art for both BLEU and METEOR metrics on the Youtube2Text dataset. We also present results on a new, larger and more challenging dataset of paired video and natural language descriptions. We propose a simple, yet effective approach for spatiotemporal feature learning using deep 3-dimensional convolutional networks (3D ConvNets) trained on a large scale supervised video dataset. Our findings are three-fold: 1) 3D ConvNets are more suitable for spatiotemporal feature learning compared to 2D ConvNets; 2) A homogeneous architecture with small 3x3x3 convolution kernels in all layers is among the best performing architectures for 3D ConvNets; and 3) Our learned features, namely C3D (Convolutional 3D), with a simple linear classifier outperform state-of-the-art methods on 4 different benchmarks and are comparable with current best methods on the other 2 benchmarks. In addition, the features are compact: achieving 52.8 accuracy on UCF101 dataset with only 10 dimensions and also very efficient to compute due to the fast inference of ConvNets. Finally, they are conceptually very simple and easy to train and use.