136 research outputs found
Story-based Video Retrieval in TV series using Plot Synopses
We present a novel approach to search for plots in the story-line of structured videos such as TV series. To this end, we propose to align natural language descriptions of the videos, such as plot synopses, with the corresponding shots in the video. Guided by subtitles and person identities the align-ment problem is formulated as an optimization task over all possible assignments and solved efficiently using dynamic programming. We evaluate our approach on a novel dataset comprising of the complete season 5 of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and show good alignment performance and the abil-ity to retrieve plots in the storyline
Who is the director of this movie? Automatic style recognition based on shot features
We show how low-level formal features, such as shot duration, meant as length
of camera takes, and shot scale, i.e. the distance between the camera and the
subject, are distinctive of a director's style in art movies. So far such
features were thought of not having enough varieties to become distinctive of
an author. However our investigation on the full filmographies of six different
authors (Scorsese, Godard, Tarr, Fellini, Antonioni, and Bergman) for a total
number of 120 movies analysed second by second, confirms that these
shot-related features do not appear as random patterns in movies from the same
director. For feature extraction we adopt methods based on both conventional
and deep learning techniques. Our findings suggest that feature sequential
patterns, i.e. how features evolve in time, are at least as important as the
related feature distributions. To the best of our knowledge this is the first
study dealing with automatic attribution of movie authorship, which opens up
interesting lines of cross-disciplinary research on the impact of style on the
aesthetic and emotional effects on the viewers
A Neural Multi-sequence Alignment TeCHnique (NeuMATCH)
The alignment of heterogeneous sequential data (video to text) is an
important and challenging problem. Standard techniques for this task, including
Dynamic Time Warping (DTW) and Conditional Random Fields (CRFs), suffer from
inherent drawbacks. Mainly, the Markov assumption implies that, given the
immediate past, future alignment decisions are independent of further history.
The separation between similarity computation and alignment decision also
prevents end-to-end training. In this paper, we propose an end-to-end neural
architecture where alignment actions are implemented as moving data between
stacks of Long Short-term Memory (LSTM) blocks. This flexible architecture
supports a large variety of alignment tasks, including one-to-one, one-to-many,
skipping unmatched elements, and (with extensions) non-monotonic alignment.
Extensive experiments on semi-synthetic and real datasets show that our
algorithm outperforms state-of-the-art baselines.Comment: Accepted at CVPR 2018 (Spotlight). arXiv file includes the paper and
the supplemental materia
Beat-Event Detection in Action Movie Franchises
While important advances were recently made towards temporally localizing and
recognizing specific human actions or activities in videos, efficient detection
and classification of long video chunks belonging to semantically defined
categories such as "pursuit" or "romance" remains challenging.We introduce a
new dataset, Action Movie Franchises, consisting of a collection of Hollywood
action movie franchises. We define 11 non-exclusive semantic categories -
called beat-categories - that are broad enough to cover most of the movie
footage. The corresponding beat-events are annotated as groups of video shots,
possibly overlapping.We propose an approach for localizing beat-events based on
classifying shots into beat-categories and learning the temporal constraints
between shots. We show that temporal constraints significantly improve the
classification performance. We set up an evaluation protocol for beat-event
localization as well as for shot classification, depending on whether movies
from the same franchise are present or not in the training data
Video Abstracting at a Semantical Level
One the most common form of a video abstract is the movie trailer. Contemporary movie trailers share a common structure across genres which allows for an automatic generation and also reflects the corresponding moviea s composition. In this thesis a system for the automatic generation of trailers is presented. In addition to action trailers, the system is able to deal with further genres such as Horror and comedy trailers, which were first manually analyzed in order to identify their basic structures. To simplify the modeling of trailers and the abstract generation itself a new video abstracting application was developed. This application is capable of performing all steps of the abstract generation automatically and allows for previews and manual optimizations. Based on this system, new abstracting models for horror and comedy trailers were created and the corresponding trailers have been automatically generated using the new abstracting models. In an evaluation the automatic trailers were compared to the original Trailers and showed a similar structure. However, the automatically generated trailers still do not exhibit the full perfection of the Hollywood originals as they lack intentional storylines across shots
Automatic movie analysis and summarisation
Automatic movie analysis is the task of employing Machine Learning methods to the
field of screenplays, movie scripts, and motion pictures to facilitate or enable various
tasks throughout the entirety of a movie’s life-cycle. From helping with making
informed decisions about a new movie script with respect to aspects such as its originality,
similarity to other movies, or even commercial viability, all the way to offering
consumers new and interesting ways of viewing the final movie, many stages in the
life-cycle of a movie stand to benefit from Machine Learning techniques that promise
to reduce human effort, time, or both. Within this field of automatic movie analysis,
this thesis addresses the task of summarising the content of screenplays, enabling users
at any stage to gain a broad understanding of a movie from greatly reduced data. The
contributions of this thesis are four-fold: (i)We introduce ScriptBase, a new large-scale
data set of original movie scripts, annotated with additional meta-information such as
genre and plot tags, cast information, and log- and tag-lines. To our knowledge, Script-
Base is the largest data set of its kind, containing scripts and information for almost
1,000 Hollywood movies. (ii) We present a dynamic summarisation model for the
screenplay domain, which allows for extraction of highly informative and important
scenes from movie scripts. The extracted summaries allow for the content of the original
script to stay largely intact and provide the user with its important parts, while
greatly reducing the script-reading time. (iii) We extend our summarisation model
to capture additional modalities beyond the screenplay text. The model is rendered
multi-modal by introducing visual information obtained from the actual movie and by
extracting scenes from the movie, allowing users to generate visual summaries of motion
pictures. (iv) We devise a novel end-to-end neural network model for generating
natural language screenplay overviews. This model enables the user to generate short
descriptive and informative texts that capture certain aspects of a movie script, such as
its genres, approximate content, or style, allowing them to gain a fast, high-level understanding
of the screenplay. Multiple automatic and human evaluations were carried
out to assess the performance of our models, demonstrating that they are well-suited
for the tasks set out in this thesis, outperforming strong baselines. Furthermore, the
ScriptBase data set has started to gain traction, and is currently used by a number of
other researchers in the field to tackle various tasks relating to screenplays and their
analysis
Movie Description
Audio Description (AD) provides linguistic descriptions of movies and allows
visually impaired people to follow a movie along with their peers. Such
descriptions are by design mainly visual and thus naturally form an interesting
data source for computer vision and computational linguistics. In this work we
propose a novel dataset which contains transcribed ADs, which are temporally
aligned to full length movies. In addition we also collected and aligned movie
scripts used in prior work and compare the two sources of descriptions. In
total the Large Scale Movie Description Challenge (LSMDC) contains a parallel
corpus of 118,114 sentences and video clips from 202 movies. First we
characterize the dataset by benchmarking different approaches for generating
video descriptions. Comparing ADs to scripts, we find that ADs are indeed more
visual and describe precisely what is shown rather than what should happen
according to the scripts created prior to movie production. Furthermore, we
present and compare the results of several teams who participated in a
challenge organized in the context of the workshop "Describing and
Understanding Video & The Large Scale Movie Description Challenge (LSMDC)", at
ICCV 2015
Movie Editing and Cognitive Event Segmentation in Virtual Reality Video
Traditional cinematography has relied for over a century on a
well-established set of editing rules, called continuity editing, to create a
sense of situational continuity. Despite massive changes in visual content
across cuts, viewers in general experience no trouble perceiving the
discontinuous flow of information as a coherent set of events. However, Virtual
Reality (VR) movies are intrinsically different from traditional movies in that
the viewer controls the camera orientation at all times. As a consequence,
common editing techniques that rely on camera orientations, zooms, etc., cannot
be used. In this paper we investigate key relevant questions to understand how
well traditional movie editing carries over to VR. To do so, we rely on recent
cognition studies and the event segmentation theory, which states that our
brains segment continuous actions into a series of discrete, meaningful events.
We first replicate one of these studies to assess whether the predictions of
such theory can be applied to VR. We next gather gaze data from viewers
watching VR videos containing different edits with varying parameters, and
provide the first systematic analysis of viewers' behavior and the perception
of continuity in VR. From this analysis we make a series of relevant findings;
for instance, our data suggests that predictions from the cognitive event
segmentation theory are useful guides for VR editing; that different types of
edits are equally well understood in terms of continuity; and that spatial
misalignments between regions of interest at the edit boundaries favor a more
exploratory behavior even after viewers have fixated on a new region of
interest. In addition, we propose a number of metrics to describe viewers'
attentional behavior in VR. We believe the insights derived from our work can
be useful as guidelines for VR content creation
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