Novel perspectives and approaches to video summarization

The increasing volume of videos requires efficient and effective techniques to index and structure videos. Video summarization is such a technique that extracts the essential information from a video, so that tasks such as comprehension by users and video content analysis can be conducted more effectively and efficiently. The research presented in this thesis investigates three novel perspectives of the video summarization problem and provides approaches to such perspectives. Our first perspective is to employ local keypoint to perform keyframe selection. Two criteria, namely Coverage and Redundancy, are introduced to guide the keyframe selection process in order to identify those representing maximum video content and sharing minimum redundancy. To efficiently deal with long videos, a top-down strategy is proposed, which splits the summarization problem to two sub-problems: scene identification and scene summarization. Our second perspective is to formulate the task of video summarization to the problem of sparse dictionary reconstruction. Our method utilizes the true sparse constraint L0 norm, instead of the relaxed constraint L2,1 norm, such that keyframes are directly selected as a sparse dictionary that can reconstruct the video frames. In addition, a Percentage Of Reconstruction (POR) criterion is proposed to intuitively guide users in selecting an appropriate length of the summary. In addition, an L2,0 constrained sparse dictionary selection model is also proposed to further verify the effectiveness of sparse dictionary reconstruction for video summarization. Lastly, we further investigate the multi-modal perspective of multimedia content summarization and enrichment. There are abundant images and videos on the Web, so it is highly desirable to effectively organize such resources for textual content enrichment. With the support of web scale images, our proposed system, namely StoryImaging, is capable of enriching arbitrary textual stories with visual content

Video summarization by group scoring

In this paper a new model for user-centered video summarization is presented. Involvement of more than one expert in generating the final video summary should be regarded as the main use case for this algorithm. This approach consists of three major steps. First, the video frames are scored by a group of operators. Next, these assigned scores are averaged to produce a singular value for each frame and lastly, the highest scored video frames alongside the corresponding audio and textual contents are extracted to be inserted into the summary. The effectiveness of this approach has been evaluated by comparing the video summaries generated by this system against the results from a number of automatic summarization tools that use different modalities for abstraction

Collaborative Summarization of Topic-Related Videos

Large collections of videos are grouped into clusters by a topic keyword, such as Eiffel Tower or Surfing, with many important visual concepts repeating across them. Such a topically close set of videos have mutual influence on each other, which could be used to summarize one of them by exploiting information from others in the set. We build on this intuition to develop a novel approach to extract a summary that simultaneously captures both important particularities arising in the given video, as well as, generalities identified from the set of videos. The topic-related videos provide visual context to identify the important parts of the video being summarized. We achieve this by developing a collaborative sparse optimization method which can be efficiently solved by a half-quadratic minimization algorithm. Our work builds upon the idea of collaborative techniques from information retrieval and natural language processing, which typically use the attributes of other similar objects to predict the attribute of a given object. Experiments on two challenging and diverse datasets well demonstrate the efficacy of our approach over state-of-the-art methods.Comment: CVPR 201

Interactive Search and Exploration in Online Discussion Forums Using Multimodal Embeddings

In this paper we present a novel interactive multimodal learning system, which facilitates search and exploration in large networks of social multimedia users. It allows the analyst to identify and select users of interest, and to find similar users in an interactive learning setting. Our approach is based on novel multimodal representations of users, words and concepts, which we simultaneously learn by deploying a general-purpose neural embedding model. We show these representations to be useful not only for categorizing users, but also for automatically generating user and community profiles. Inspired by traditional summarization approaches, we create the profiles by selecting diverse and representative content from all available modalities, i.e. the text, image and user modality. The usefulness of the approach is evaluated using artificial actors, which simulate user behavior in a relevance feedback scenario. Multiple experiments were conducted in order to evaluate the quality of our multimodal representations, to compare different embedding strategies, and to determine the importance of different modalities. We demonstrate the capabilities of the proposed approach on two different multimedia collections originating from the violent online extremism forum Stormfront and the microblogging platform Twitter, which are particularly interesting due to the high semantic level of the discussions they feature

Indirect Match Highlights Detection with Deep Convolutional Neural Networks

Highlights in a sport video are usually referred as actions that stimulate excitement or attract attention of the audience. A big effort is spent in designing techniques which find automatically highlights, in order to automatize the otherwise manual editing process. Most of the state-of-the-art approaches try to solve the problem by training a classifier using the information extracted on the tv-like framing of players playing on the game pitch, learning to detect game actions which are labeled by human observers according to their perception of highlight. Obviously, this is a long and expensive work. In this paper, we reverse the paradigm: instead of looking at the gameplay, inferring what could be exciting for the audience, we directly analyze the audience behavior, which we assume is triggered by events happening during the game. We apply deep 3D Convolutional Neural Network (3D-CNN) to extract visual features from cropped video recordings of the supporters that are attending the event. Outputs of the crops belonging to the same frame are then accumulated to produce a value indicating the Highlight Likelihood (HL) which is then used to discriminate between positive (i.e. when a highlight occurs) and negative samples (i.e. standard play or time-outs). Experimental results on a public dataset of ice-hockey matches demonstrate the effectiveness of our method and promote further research in this new exciting direction.Comment: "Social Signal Processing and Beyond" workshop, in conjunction with ICIAP 201

Query-Focused Video Summarization: Dataset, Evaluation, and A Memory Network Based Approach

Recent years have witnessed a resurgence of interest in video summarization. However, one of the main obstacles to the research on video summarization is the user subjectivity - users have various preferences over the summaries. The subjectiveness causes at least two problems. First, no single video summarizer fits all users unless it interacts with and adapts to the individual users. Second, it is very challenging to evaluate the performance of a video summarizer. To tackle the first problem, we explore the recently proposed query-focused video summarization which introduces user preferences in the form of text queries about the video into the summarization process. We propose a memory network parameterized sequential determinantal point process in order to attend the user query onto different video frames and shots. To address the second challenge, we contend that a good evaluation metric for video summarization should focus on the semantic information that humans can perceive rather than the visual features or temporal overlaps. To this end, we collect dense per-video-shot concept annotations, compile a new dataset, and suggest an efficient evaluation method defined upon the concept annotations. We conduct extensive experiments contrasting our video summarizer to existing ones and present detailed analyses about the dataset and the new evaluation method