Automatically describing video content with natural language is a fundamental
challenge of multimedia. Recurrent Neural Networks (RNN), which models sequence
dynamics, has attracted increasing attention on visual interpretation. However,
most existing approaches generate a word locally with given previous words and
the visual content, while the relationship between sentence semantics and
visual content is not holistically exploited. As a result, the generated
sentences may be contextually correct but the semantics (e.g., subjects, verbs
or objects) are not true.
This paper presents a novel unified framework, named Long Short-Term Memory
with visual-semantic Embedding (LSTM-E), which can simultaneously explore the
learning of LSTM and visual-semantic embedding. The former aims to locally
maximize the probability of generating the next word given previous words and
visual content, while the latter is to create a visual-semantic embedding space
for enforcing the relationship between the semantics of the entire sentence and
visual content. Our proposed LSTM-E consists of three components: a 2-D and/or
3-D deep convolutional neural networks for learning powerful video
representation, a deep RNN for generating sentences, and a joint embedding
model for exploring the relationships between visual content and sentence
semantics. The experiments on YouTube2Text dataset show that our proposed
LSTM-E achieves to-date the best reported performance in generating natural
sentences: 45.3% and 31.0% in terms of BLEU@4 and METEOR, respectively. We also
demonstrate that LSTM-E is superior in predicting Subject-Verb-Object (SVO)
triplets to several state-of-the-art techniques
