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
