Hierarchical Boundary-Aware Neural Encoder for Video Captioning

The use of Recurrent Neural Networks for video captioning has recently gained a lot of attention, since they can be used both to encode the input video and to generate the corresponding description. In this paper, we present a recurrent video encoding scheme which can discover and leverage the hierarchical structure of the video. Unlike the classical encoder-decoder approach, in which a video is encoded continuously by a recurrent layer, we propose a novel LSTM cell, which can identify discontinuity points between frames or segments and modify the temporal connections of the encoding layer accordingly. We evaluate our approach on three large-scale datasets: the Montreal Video Annotation dataset, the MPII Movie Description dataset and the Microsoft Video Description Corpus. Experiments show that our approach can discover appropriate hierarchical representations of input videos and improve the state of the art results on movie description datasets

A Hierarchical Quasi-Recurrent approach to Video Captioning

Video captioning has picked up a considerable measure of attention thanks to the use of Recurrent Neural Networks, since they can be utilized to both encode the input video and to create the corresponding description. In this paper, we present a recurrent video encoding scheme which can find and exploit the layered structure of the video. Differently from the established encoder-decoder approach, in which a video is encoded continuously by a recurrent layer, we propose to employ Quasi-Recurrent Neural Networks, further extending their basic cell with a boundary detector which can recognize discontinuity points between frames or segments and likewise modify the temporal connections of the encoding layer. We assess our approach on a large scale dataset, the Montreal Video Annotation dataset. Experiments demonstrate that our approach can find suitable levels of representation of the input information, while reducing the computational requirements

Automatic Video Captioning using Deep Neural Network

Video understanding has become increasingly important as surveillance, social, and informational videos weave themselves into our everyday lives. Video captioning offers a simple way to summarize, index, and search the data. Most video captioning models utilize a video encoder and captioning decoder framework. Hierarchical encoders can abstractly capture clip level temporal features to represent a video, but the clips are at fixed time steps. This thesis research introduces two models: a hierarchical model with steered captioning, and a Multi-stream Hierarchical Boundary model. The steered captioning model is the first attention model to smartly guide an attention model to appropriate locations in a video by using visual attributes. The Multi-stream Hierarchical Boundary model combines a fixed hierarchy recurrent architecture with a soft hierarchy layer by using intrinsic feature boundary cuts within a video to define clips. This thesis also introduces a novel parametric Gaussian attention which removes the restriction of soft attention techniques which require fixed length video streams. By carefully incorporating Gaussian attention in designated layers, the proposed models demonstrate state-of-the-art video captioning results on recent datasets

Multi-Modal Deep Learning to Understand Vision and Language

Developing intelligent agents that can perceive and understand the rich visual world around us has been a long-standing goal in the field of artificial intelligence. In the last few years, significant progress has been made towards this goal and deep learning has been attributed to recent incredible advances in general visual and language understanding. Convolutional neural networks have been used to learn image representations while recurrent neural networks have demonstrated the ability to generate text from visual stimuli. In this thesis, we develop methods and techniques using hybrid convolutional and recurrent neural network architectures that connect visual data and natural language utterances. Towards appreciating these methods, this work is divided into two broad groups. Firstly, we introduce a general purpose attention mechanism modeled using a continuous function for video understanding. The use of an attention based hierarchical approach along with automatic boundary detection advances state-of-the-art video captioning results. We also develop techniques for summarizing and annotating long videos. In the second part, we introduce architectures along with training techniques to produce a common connection space where natural language sentences are efficiently and accurately connected with visual modalities. In this connection space, similar concepts lie close, while dissimilar concepts lie far apart, irrespective` of their modality. We discuss four modality transformations: visual to text, text to visual, visual to visual and text to text. We introduce a novel attention mechanism to align multi-modal embeddings which are learned through a multi-modal metric loss function. The common vector space is shown to enable bidirectional generation of images and text. The learned common vector space is evaluated on multiple image-text datasets for cross-modal retrieval and zero-shot retrieval. The models are shown to advance the state-of-the-art on tasks that require joint processing of images and natural language

이야기형 설명문을 활용한 대규모 비디오 학습 연구

학위논문 (박사) -- 서울대학교 대학원 : 공과대학 컴퓨터공학부, 2021. 2. 김건희.Extensive contributions are being made to develop intelligent agents that can recognize and communicate with the world. In this sense, various video-language tasks have drawn a lot of interests in computer vision research, including image/video captioning, video retrieval and video question answering. It can be applied to high-level computer vision tasks and various future industries such as search engines, social marketing, automated driving, and robotics support through QA / dialog generation for the surrounding environment. However, despite these developments, video-language learning suffers from a higher degree of complexity. This thesis investigates methodologies for learning the relationship between videos and free-formed languages, including explanations, conversations, and question-and-answers, so that the machine can easily adapt to target downstream tasks. First, we introduce several methods to learn the relationship between long sentences and videos efficiently. We introduce the approaches for supervising human attention transfer for the video attention model, which shows the video attention mechanism can benefit from explicit human gaze labels. Next, we introduce the end-to-end semantic attention method, which further reduces the visual attention algorithm's complexity by using the representative visual concept word detected by the attention-based detector. As a follow-up study on previous methods, we introduce a JSFusion (Joint Sequence Fusion) method that enables efficient video search and QA by enabling many-to-many matching of attention model. Next, we introduce the CiSIN(Character in Story Identification Network), which uses Attention to increase the performance of character grounding and character re-identification in the movie. Finally, we introduce Transitional Adaptation, which promotes the caption generation models to generates coherent narratives for long videos. In summary, this thesis presents a novel approaches for automatic video description generation/retrieval and shows the benefits of extracting linguistic knowledge for object and motion in the video as well as the advantage of multimodal audio-visual learning for understanding videos. Since the proposed methods are easily adapted to any video-language tasks, it is expected to be applied to the latest models, bringing additional performance improvements. Moving forward, we plan to design an unsupervised video learning framework that can solve many challenges in the industry by integrating an unlimited amount of video, audio, and free-formed language data from the web.시각-언어 학습은 이미지/비디오 캡션(Image/Video captioning), 시각 질의응답(Visual Question and Answering), 비디오 검색(Video Retrieval), 장면 이해(scene understanding), 이벤트 인식(event detection) 등 고차원의 컴퓨터 비전 태스크(task)뿐만 아니라 주변 환경에 대한 질의 응답 및 대화 생성(Dialogue Generation)으로 인터넷 검색 뿐만 아니라 최근 활발한 소셜 마케팅(Social Marketing) 자율 주행(Automated Driving), 로보틱스(Robotics)을 보조하는 등 여러 미래 산업에 적용될 수 있어 활발히 연구되고 있는 중요한 분야이다. 컴퓨터 비젼과 자연어 처리는 이러한 중요성을 바탕으로 각자 고유한 영역에서 발전을 거듭해 왔으나, 최근 딥러닝의 등장과 함께 눈부시게 발전하면서 서로를 보완하며 학습 결과를 향상시키는 등 큰 시너지 효과를 발휘하게 되었다. 하지만 이런 발전에도 불구하고, 비디오-언어간 학습은 문제의 복잡도가 한층 높아 어려움을 겪게 되는 경우가 많다. 본 논문에서는 비디오와 이에 대응하는 설명, 대화, 질의 응답 등 더 나아가 자유 형태의 언어 (Free-formed language)간의 관계를 더욱 효율적으로 학습하고, 목표 임무에 잘 대응할 수 있도록 개선하는 것을 목표로 한다. 먼저, 시각적 복잡도가 이미지보다 높은 비디오와 긴 문장 사이의 관계를 효율적으로 학습하기 위한 여러 방법들을 소개한다. 인간의 주의 인식(Attention) 모델을 비디오-언어 모델에 지도 학습 하는 방법을 소개하고, 이어서 비디오에서 우선 검출된 대표 시각 단어를 매개로 하여 주의 인식(Attention) 알고리즘의 복잡도를 더욱 줄이는 의미 중심 주의 인식 (Semantic Attention) 방법, 어텐션 모델의 다대다 매칭을 기반으로 효율적인 비디오 검색 및 질의응답을 가능케 하는 비디오-언어간 융합 (Joint Sequence Fusion) 방법 등 비디오 주의 인식을 효율적으로 학습시킬 수 있는 방법들을 제시한다. 다음으로는, 주의 인식(Attention) 모델이 물체-단어 간 관계를 넘어 비디오 상에서 인물 검색 (Person Searching) 그리고 인물 재 식별 (Person Re-Identification)을 동시에 수행하며 상승작용을 일으키는 스토리 속 캐릭터 인식 신경망 (Character in Story Identification Network) 을 소개하며, 마지막으로 자기 지도 학습(Self-supervised Learning)을 통해 주의 인식(Attention) 기반 언어 모델이 긴 비디오에 대한 설명을 연관성 있게 잘 생성할 수 있도록 유도하는 방법을 소개한다. 요약하자면, 이 학위 논문에서 제안한 새로운 방법론들은 비디오-언어 학습에 해당하는 비디오 캡션(Video captioning), 비디오 검색(Video Retrieval), 시각 질의응답(Video Question and Answering)등을 해결할 수 있는 기술적 디딤돌이 되며, 비디오 캡션 학습을 통해 학습된 주의 인식 모듈은 검색 및 질의응답, 인물 검색 등 각 네트워크에 이식되면서 새로운 문제들에 대해 동시에 최고 수준(State-of-the-art)의 성능을 달성하였다. 이를 통해 비디오-언어 학습으로 얻은 언어 지식의 이전은 시각-청각을 아우르는 비디오 멀티모달 학습에 큰 도움이 되는 것을 실험적으로 보여준다. 향후 작업 방향 (Future Work)으로는 앞서 연구한 내용들을 기반으로 웹 속에 존재하는 대규모의 언어, 비디오, 오디오 데이터를 통합해 학습에 활용하여 산업계의 많은 난제를 해결할 수 있는 비지도 학습 모델을 만들고자 한다.Chapter 1 Introduction 1.1 Contributions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .4 1.2 Outline of the thesis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .8 Chapter 2 Related Work 2.1 Video Captioning . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .9 2.2 Video Retrieval with Natural Language . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12 2.3 Video Question and Answering . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13 2.4 Cross-modal Representation Learning for Vision and LanguageTasks . . . . 15 Chapter 3 Human Attention Transfer for Video Captioning18 3.1 Introduction 3.2 Video Datasets for Caption and Gaze . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21 3.3 Approach . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22 3.3.1 Video Pre-processing and Description . . . . . . . . . . . 22 3.3.2The Recurrent Gaze Prediction (RGP) Model . . . . . . . 23 3.3.3Construction of Visual Feature Pools . . . . . . . . . . . . 24 3.3.4The Decoder for Caption Generation . . . . . . . . . . . . 26 3.3.5Training . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28 3.4 Experiments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29 3.4.1Evaluation of Gaze Prediction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29 3.4.2Evaluation of Video Captioning . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 32 3.4.3Human Evaluation via AMT . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 35 3.5 Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 36 Chapter 4 Semantic Word Attention for Video QA and VideoCaptioning 4.1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 37 4.1.1Related Work . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 39 4.1.2Contributions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 40 4.2 Approach . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 41 4.2.1Preprocessing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 41 4.2.2An Attention Model for Concept Detection . . . . . . . . 42 4.2.3Video-to-Language Models . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 45 4.2.4A Model for Description . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 45 4.2.5A Model for Fill-in-the-Blank . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 48 4.2.6A Model for Multiple-Choice Test . . . . . . . . . . . . . 50 4.2.7A Model for Retrieval . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 51 4.3 Experiments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 52 4.3.1The LSMDC Dataset and Tasks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 52 4.3.2Quantitative Results . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 54 4.3.3Qualitative Results . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 56 4.4 Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 57 Chapter 5 Joint Sequnece Fusion Attention for Multimodal Sequence Data 5.1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 59 5.2 Related Work . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 61 5.3 Approach . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 63 5.3.1Preprocessing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 63 5.3.2The Joint Semantic Tensor . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 65 5.3.3The Convolutional Hierarchical Decoder . . . . . . . . . . 66 5.3.4An Illustrative Example of How the JSFusion Model Works 68 5.3.5Training . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 69 5.3.6Implementation of Video-Language Models . . . . . . . . 69 5.4 Experiments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 71 5.4.1LSMDC Dataset and Tasks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 71 5.4.2MSR-VTT-(RET/MC) Dataset and Tasks . . . . . . . . . 73 5.4.3Quantitative Results . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 74 5.4.4Qualitative Results . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 76 5.5 Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 78 Chapter 6 Character Re-Identification and Character Ground-ing for Movie Understanding 6.1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 79 6.2 Related Work . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 81 6.3 Approach . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 83 6.3.1Video Preprocessing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 84 6.3.2Visual Track Embedding . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 85 6.3.3Textual Character Embedding . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 86 6.3.4Character Grounding . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 87 6.3.5Re-Identification . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 88 6.3.6Joint Training . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 90 6.4 Experiments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 92 6.4.1Experimental Setup . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 92 6.4.2Quantitative Results . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 93 6.4.3Qualitative Results . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 95 6.5 Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 97 Chapter 7 Transitional Adaptation of Pretrained Models forVisual Storytelling 7.1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 99 7.2 Related Work . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 101 7.3 Approach . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 103 7.3.1The Visual Encoder . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 104 7.3.2The Language Generator . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 104 7.3.3Adaptation training . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 105 7.3.4The Sequential Coherence Loss . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 105 7.3.5Training with the adaptation Loss . . . . . . . . . . . . . 107 7.3.6Fine-tuning and Inference . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 107 7.4 Experiments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 108 7.4.1Experimental Setup . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 109 7.4.2Quantitative Results . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 112 7.4.3Further Analyses . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 112 7.4.4Human Evaluation Results . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 115 7.4.5Qualitative Results . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 116 7.5 Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 116 Chapter 8 Conclusion 8.1 Summary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 117 8.2 Future Works . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 120 Bibliography ... 123 요약 ... 148 Acknowledgements ... 150Docto

Deep Learning for Semantic Video Understanding

The field of computer vision has long strived to extract understanding from images and videos sequences. The recent flood of video data along with massive increments in computing power have provided the perfect environment to generate advanced research to extract intelligence from video data. Video data is ubiquitous, occurring in numerous everyday activities such as surveillance, traffic, movies, sports, etc. This massive amount of video needs to be analyzed and processed efficiently to extract semantic features towards video understanding. Such capabilities could benefit surveillance, video analytics and visually challenged people. While watching a long video, humans have the uncanny ability to bypass unnecessary information and concentrate on the important events. These key events can be used as a higher-level description or summary of a long video. Inspired by the human visual cortex, this research affords such abilities in computers using neural networks. Useful or interesting events are first extracted from a video and then deep learning methodologies are used to extract natural language summaries for each video sequence. Previous approaches of video description either have been domain specific or use a template based approach to fill detected objects such as verbs or actions to constitute a grammatically correct sentence. This work involves exploiting temporal contextual information for sentence generation while working on wide domain datasets. Current state-of- the-art video description methodologies are well suited for small video clips whereas this research can also be applied to long sequences of video. This work proposes methods to generate visual summaries of long videos, and in addition proposes techniques to annotate and generate textual summaries of the videos using recurrent networks. End to end video summarization immensely depends on abstractive summarization of video descriptions. State-of- the-art neural language & attention joint models have been used to generate textual summaries. Interesting segments of long video are extracted based on image quality as well as cinematographic and consumer preference. This novel approach will be a stepping stone for a variety of innovative applications such as video retrieval, automatic summarization for visually impaired persons, automatic movie review generation, video question and answering systems

Deep Architectures for Visual Recognition and Description

In recent times, digital media contents are inherently of multimedia type, consisting of the form text, audio, image and video. Several of the outstanding computer Vision (CV) problems are being successfully solved with the help of modern Machine Learning (ML) techniques. Plenty of research work has already been carried out in the field of Automatic Image Annotation (AIA), Image Captioning and Video Tagging. Video Captioning, i.e., automatic description generation from digital video, however, is a different and complex problem altogether. This study compares various existing video captioning approaches available today and attempts their classification and analysis based on different parameters, viz., type of captioning methods (generation/retrieval), type of learning models employed, the desired output description length generated, etc. This dissertation also attempts to critically analyze the existing benchmark datasets used in various video captioning models and the evaluation metrics for assessing the final quality of the resultant video descriptions generated. A detailed study of important existing models, highlighting their comparative advantages as well as disadvantages are also included. In this study a novel approach for video captioning on the Microsoft Video Description (MSVD) dataset and Microsoft Video-to-Text (MSR-VTT) dataset is proposed using supervised learning techniques to train a deep combinational framework, for achieving better quality video captioning via predicting semantic tags. We develop simple shallow CNN (2D and 3D) as feature extractors, Deep Neural Networks (DNNs and Bidirectional LSTMs (BiLSTMs) as tag prediction models and Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs) (LSTM) model as the language model. The aim of the work was to provide an alternative narrative to generating captions from videos via semantic tag predictions and deploy simpler shallower deep model architectures with lower memory requirements as solution so that it is not very memory extensive and the developed models prove to be stable and viable options when the scale of the data is increased. This study also successfully employed deep architectures like the Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) for speeding up automation process of hand gesture recognition and classification of the sign languages of the Indian classical dance form, ‘Bharatnatyam’. This hand gesture classification is primarily aimed at 1) building a novel dataset of 2D single hand gestures belonging to 27 classes that were collected from (i) Google search engine (Google images), (ii) YouTube videos (dynamic and with background considered) and (iii) professional artists under staged environment constraints (plain backgrounds). 2) exploring the effectiveness of CNNs for identifying and classifying the single hand gestures by optimizing the hyperparameters, and 3) evaluating the impacts of transfer learning and double transfer learning, which is a novel concept explored for achieving higher classification accuracy