30,287 research outputs found
Video Storytelling: Textual Summaries for Events
Bridging vision and natural language is a longstanding goal in computer
vision and multimedia research. While earlier works focus on generating a
single-sentence description for visual content, recent works have studied
paragraph generation. In this work, we introduce the problem of video
storytelling, which aims at generating coherent and succinct stories for long
videos. Video storytelling introduces new challenges, mainly due to the
diversity of the story and the length and complexity of the video. We propose
novel methods to address the challenges. First, we propose a context-aware
framework for multimodal embedding learning, where we design a Residual
Bidirectional Recurrent Neural Network to leverage contextual information from
past and future. Second, we propose a Narrator model to discover the underlying
storyline. The Narrator is formulated as a reinforcement learning agent which
is trained by directly optimizing the textual metric of the generated story. We
evaluate our method on the Video Story dataset, a new dataset that we have
collected to enable the study. We compare our method with multiple
state-of-the-art baselines, and show that our method achieves better
performance, in terms of quantitative measures and user study.Comment: Published in IEEE Transactions on Multimedi
Coherent Multi-Sentence Video Description with Variable Level of Detail
Humans can easily describe what they see in a coherent way and at varying
level of detail. However, existing approaches for automatic video description
are mainly focused on single sentence generation and produce descriptions at a
fixed level of detail. In this paper, we address both of these limitations: for
a variable level of detail we produce coherent multi-sentence descriptions of
complex videos. We follow a two-step approach where we first learn to predict a
semantic representation (SR) from video and then generate natural language
descriptions from the SR. To produce consistent multi-sentence descriptions, we
model across-sentence consistency at the level of the SR by enforcing a
consistent topic. We also contribute both to the visual recognition of objects
proposing a hand-centric approach as well as to the robust generation of
sentences using a word lattice. Human judges rate our multi-sentence
descriptions as more readable, correct, and relevant than related work. To
understand the difference between more detailed and shorter descriptions, we
collect and analyze a video description corpus of three levels of detail.Comment: 10 page
Going Deeper into Action Recognition: A Survey
Understanding human actions in visual data is tied to advances in
complementary research areas including object recognition, human dynamics,
domain adaptation and semantic segmentation. Over the last decade, human action
analysis evolved from earlier schemes that are often limited to controlled
environments to nowadays advanced solutions that can learn from millions of
videos and apply to almost all daily activities. Given the broad range of
applications from video surveillance to human-computer interaction, scientific
milestones in action recognition are achieved more rapidly, eventually leading
to the demise of what used to be good in a short time. This motivated us to
provide a comprehensive review of the notable steps taken towards recognizing
human actions. To this end, we start our discussion with the pioneering methods
that use handcrafted representations, and then, navigate into the realm of deep
learning based approaches. We aim to remain objective throughout this survey,
touching upon encouraging improvements as well as inevitable fallbacks, in the
hope of raising fresh questions and motivating new research directions for the
reader
A Dataset for Movie Description
Descriptive video service (DVS) 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 DVS, which is
temporally aligned to full length HD movies. In addition we also collected the
aligned movie scripts which have been used in prior work and compare the two
different sources of descriptions. In total the Movie Description dataset
contains a parallel corpus of over 54,000 sentences and video snippets from 72
HD movies. We characterize the dataset by benchmarking different approaches for
generating video descriptions. Comparing DVS to scripts, we find that DVS is
far more visual and describes precisely what is shown rather than what should
happen according to the scripts created prior to movie production
Multimodal Visual Concept Learning with Weakly Supervised Techniques
Despite the availability of a huge amount of video data accompanied by
descriptive texts, it is not always easy to exploit the information contained
in natural language in order to automatically recognize video concepts. Towards
this goal, in this paper we use textual cues as means of supervision,
introducing two weakly supervised techniques that extend the Multiple Instance
Learning (MIL) framework: the Fuzzy Sets Multiple Instance Learning (FSMIL) and
the Probabilistic Labels Multiple Instance Learning (PLMIL). The former encodes
the spatio-temporal imprecision of the linguistic descriptions with Fuzzy Sets,
while the latter models different interpretations of each description's
semantics with Probabilistic Labels, both formulated through a convex
optimization algorithm. In addition, we provide a novel technique to extract
weak labels in the presence of complex semantics, that consists of semantic
similarity computations. We evaluate our methods on two distinct problems,
namely face and action recognition, in the challenging and realistic setting of
movies accompanied by their screenplays, contained in the COGNIMUSE database.
We show that, on both tasks, our method considerably outperforms a
state-of-the-art weakly supervised approach, as well as other baselines.Comment: CVPR 201
Emergence of Grounded Compositional Language in Multi-Agent Populations
By capturing statistical patterns in large corpora, machine learning has
enabled significant advances in natural language processing, including in
machine translation, question answering, and sentiment analysis. However, for
agents to intelligently interact with humans, simply capturing the statistical
patterns is insufficient. In this paper we investigate if, and how, grounded
compositional language can emerge as a means to achieve goals in multi-agent
populations. Towards this end, we propose a multi-agent learning environment
and learning methods that bring about emergence of a basic compositional
language. This language is represented as streams of abstract discrete symbols
uttered by agents over time, but nonetheless has a coherent structure that
possesses a defined vocabulary and syntax. We also observe emergence of
non-verbal communication such as pointing and guiding when language
communication is unavailable
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
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