Classically, visual object tracking involves following a target object throughout a given video, and it provides us the motion trajectory of the object. However, for many practical applications, this output is often insufficient since additional semantic information is required to act on the video material. Example applications of this are surveillance and target-specific video summarization, where the target needs to be monitored with respect to certain predefined constraints, e.g., 'when standing near a yellow car'. This paper explores, tracking visual objects subjected to additional lingual constraints. Differently from Li et al., we impose additional lingual constraints upon tracking, which enables new applications of tracking. Whereas in their work the goal is to improve and extend upon tracking itself. To perform benchmarks and experiments, we contribute two datasets: c-MOT16 and c-LaSOT, curated through appending additional constraints to the frames of the original LaSOT and MOT16 datasets. We also experiment with two deep models SiamCT-DFG and SiamCT-CA, obtained through extending a recent state-of-the-art Siamese tracking method and adding modules inspired from the fields of natural language processing and visual question answering. Through experimental results, we show that the proposed model SiamCT-CA can significantly outperform its counterparts. Furthermore, our method enables the selective compression of videos, based on the validity of the constraint.
The huge amount of video data produced daily by camera-based systems, such as surveilance, medical and telecommunication systems, emerges the need for effective video summarization (VS) methods. These methods should be capable of creating an overview of the video content. In this paper, we propose a novel VS method based on a Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) model pre-trained with human eye fixations. The main contribution of the proposed method is that it can provide perceptually compatible video summaries by combining both perceived color and spatiotemporal visual attention cues in a unsupervised scheme. Several fusion approaches are considered for robustness under uncertainty, and personalization. The proposed method is evaluated in comparison to state-of-the-art VS approaches on the benchmark dataset VSUMM. The experimental results conclude that SalSum outperforms the state-of-the-art approaches by providing the highest f-measure score on the VSUMM benchmark.
Gesture behavior is a natural part of human conversation. Much work has focused on removing the need for tedious hand-animation to create embodied conversational agents by designing speech-driven gesture generators. However, these generators often work in a black-box manner, assuming a general relationship between input speech and output motion. As their success remains limited, we investigate in more detail how speech may relate to different aspects of gesture motion. We determine a number of parameters characterizing gesture, such as speed and gesture size, and explore their relationship to the speech signal in a two-fold manner. First, we train multiple recurrent networks to predict the gesture parameters from speech to understand how well gesture attributes can be modeled from speech alone. We find that gesture parameters can be partially predicted from speech, and some parameters, such as path length, being predicted more accurately than others, like velocity. Second, we design a perceptual study to assess the importance of each gesture parameter for producing motion that people perceive as appropriate for the speech. Results show that a degradation in any parameter was viewed negatively, but some changes, such as hand shape, are more impactful than others. A video summarization can be found at https://youtu.be/aw6-_5kmLjY.
Video processing has become a popular research direction in computer vision due to its various applications such as video summarization, action recognition, etc. Recently, deep learning-based methods have achieved impressive results in action recognition. However, these methods need to process a full video sequence to recognize the action, even though most of these frames are similar and non-essential to recognizing a particular action. Additionally, these non-essential frames increase the computational cost and can confuse a method in action recognition. Instead, the important frames called keyframes not only are helpful in the recognition of an action but also can reduce the processing time of each video sequence for classification or in other applications, e.g. summarization. As well, current methods in video processing have not yet been demonstrated in an online fashion. Motivated by the above, we propose an online learnable module for keyframe extraction. This module can be used to select key-shots in video and thus can be applied to video summarization. The extracted keyframes can be used as input to any deep learning-based classification model to recognize action. We also propose a plugin module to use the semantic word vector as input along with keyframes and a novel train/test strategy for the classification models. To our best knowledge, this is the first time such an online module and train/test strategy have been proposed. The experimental results on many commonly used datasets in video summarization and in action recognition have shown impressive results using the proposed module.
Video summarization is an effective way to facilitate video searching and browsing. Most of existing systems employ encoder-decoder based recurrent neural networks, which fail to explicitly diversify the system-generated summary frames while requiring intensive computations. In this paper, we propose an efficient convolutional neural network architecture for video SUMmarization via Global Diverse Attention called SUM-GDA, which adapts attention mechanism in a global perspective to consider pairwise temporal relations of video frames. Particularly, the GDA module has two advantages: 1) it models the relations within paired frames as well as the relations among all pairs, thus capturing the global attention across all frames of one video; 2) it reflects the importance of each frame to the whole video, leading to diverse attention on these frames. Thus, SUM-GDA is beneficial for generating diverse frames to form satisfactory video summary. Extensive experiments on three data sets, i.e., SumMe, TVSum, and VTW, have demonstrated that SUM-GDA and its extension outperform other competing state-of-the-art methods with remarkable improvements. In addition, the proposed models can be run in parallel with significantly less computational costs, which helps the deployment in highly demanding applications.
Summarization of multimedia data becomes increasingly significant as it is the basis for many real-world applications, such as question answering, Web search, and so forth. Most existing multi-modal summarization works however have used visual complementary features extracted from images rather than videos, thereby losing abundant information. Hence, we propose a novel multi-modal summarization task to summarize from a document and its associated video. In this work, we also build a baseline general model with effective strategies, i.e., bi-hop attention and improved late fusion mechanisms to bridge the gap between different modalities, and a bi-stream summarization strategy to employ text and video summarization simultaneously. Comprehensive experiments show that the proposed model is beneficial for multi-modal summarization and superior to existing methods. Moreover, we collect a novel dataset and it provides a new resource for future study that results from documents and videos.
Video summarization plays an important role in selecting keyframe for understanding a video. Traditionally, it aims to find the most representative and diverse contents (or frames) in a video for short summaries. Recently, query-conditioned video summarization has been introduced, which considers user queries to learn more user-oriented summaries and its preference. However, there are obstacles in text queries for user subjectivity and finding similarity between the user query and input frames. In this work, (i) Image is introduced as a query for user preference (ii) a mathematical model is proposed to minimize redundancy based on the loss function & summary variance and (iii) the similarity score between the query image and input video to obtain the summarized video. Furthermore, the Object-based Query Image (OQI) dataset has been introduced, which contains the query images. The proposed method has been validated using UT Egocentric (UTE) dataset. The proposed model successfully resolved the issues of (i) user preference, (ii) recognize important frames and selecting that keyframe in daily life videos, with different illumination conditions. The proposed method achieved 57.06% average F1-Score for UTE dataset and outperforms the existing state-of-theart by 11.01%. The process time is 7.81 times faster than actual time of video Experiments on a recently proposed UTE dataset show the efficiency of the proposed method
Video summarization aims to select representative frames to retain high-level information, which is usually solved by predicting the segment-wise importance score via a softmax function. However, softmax function suffers in retaining high-rank representations for complex visual or sequential information, which is known as the Softmax Bottleneck problem. In this paper, we propose a novel framework named Dual Mixture Attention (DMASum) model with Meta Learning for video summarization that tackles the softmax bottleneck problem, where the Mixture of Attention layer (MoA) effectively increases the model capacity by employing twice self-query attention that can capture the second-order changes in addition to the initial query-key attention, and a novel Single Frame Meta Learning rule is then introduced to achieve more generalization to small datasets with limited training sources. Furthermore, the DMASum significantly exploits both visual and sequential attention that connects local key-frame and global attention in an accumulative way. We adopt the new evaluation protocol on two public datasets, SumMe, and TVSum. Both qualitative and quantitative experiments manifest significant improvements over the state-of-the-art methods.
Automatic video summarization is still an unsolved problem due to several challenges. We take steps towards making automatic video summarization more realistic by addressing them. Firstly, the currently available datasets either have very short videos or have few long videos of only a particular type. We introduce a new benchmarking dataset VISIOCITY which comprises of longer videos across six different categories with dense concept annotations capable of supporting different flavors of video summarization and can be used for other vision problems. Secondly, for long videos, human reference summaries are difficult to obtain. We present a novel recipe based on pareto optimality to automatically generate multiple reference summaries from indirect ground truth present in VISIOCITY. We show that these summaries are at par with human summaries. Thirdly, we demonstrate that in the presence of multiple ground truth summaries (due to the highly subjective nature of the task), learning from a single combined ground truth summary using a single loss function is not a good idea. We propose a simple recipe VISIOCITY-SUM to enhance an existing model using a combination of losses and demonstrate that it beats the current state of the art techniques when tested on VISIOCITY. We also show that a single measure to evaluate a summary, as is the current typical practice, falls short. We propose a framework for better quantitative assessment of summary quality which is closer to human judgment than a single measure, say F1. We report the performance of a few representative techniques of video summarization on VISIOCITY assessed using various measures and bring out the limitation of the techniques and/or the assessment mechanism in modeling human judgment and demonstrate the effectiveness of our evaluation framework in doing so.
Video summarization aims at generating concise video summaries from the lengthy videos, to achieve better user watching experience. Due to the subjectivity, purely supervised methods for video summarization may bring the inherent errors from the annotations. To solve the subjectivity problem, we study the general user summarization process. General users usually watch the whole video, compare interesting clips and select some clips to form a final summary. Inspired by the general user behaviours, we formulate the summarization process as multiple sequential decision-making processes, and propose Comparison-Selection Network (CoSNet) based on multi-agent reinforcement learning. Each agent focuses on a video clip and constantly changes its focus during the iterations, and the final focus clips of all agents form the summary. The comparison network provides the agent with the visual feature from clips and the chronological feature from the past round, while the selection network of the agent makes decisions on the change of its focus clip. The specially designed unsupervised reward and supervised reward together contribute to the policy advancement, each containing local and global parts. Extensive experiments on two benchmark datasets show that CoSNet outperforms state-of-the-art unsupervised methods with the unsupervised reward and surpasses most supervised methods with the complete reward.
The goal of video summarization is to select keyframes that are visually diverse and can represent a whole story of an input video. State-of-the-art approaches for video summarization have mostly regarded the task as a frame-wise keyframe selection problem by aggregating all frames with equal weight. However, to find informative parts of the video, it is necessary to consider how all the frames of the video are related to each other. To this end, we cast video summarization as a graph modeling problem. We propose recursive graph modeling networks for video summarization, termed SumGraph, to represent a relation graph, where frames are regarded as nodes and nodes are connected by semantic relationships among frames. Our networks accomplish this through a recursive approach to refine an initially estimated graph to correctly classify each node as a keyframe by reasoning the graph representation via graph convolutional networks. To leverage SumGraph in a more practical environment, we also present a way to adapt our graph modeling in an unsupervised fashion. With SumGraph, we achieved state-of-the-art performance on several benchmarks for video summarization in both supervised and unsupervised manners.
In this paper, we provide the first deterministic algorithm that achieves the tight $1-1/e$ approximation guarantee for submodular maximization under a cardinality (size) constraint while making a number of queries that scales only linearly with the size of the ground set $n$. To complement our result, we also show strong information-theoretic lower bounds. More specifically, we show that when the maximum cardinality allowed for a solution is constant, no algorithm making a sub-linear number of function evaluations can guarantee any constant approximation ratio. Furthermore, when the constraint allows the selection of a constant fraction of the ground set, we show that any algorithm making fewer than $\Omega(n/\log(n))$ function evaluations cannot perform better than an algorithm that simply outputs a uniformly random subset of the ground set of the right size. We then provide a variant of our deterministic algorithm for the more general knapsack constraint, which is the first linear-time algorithm that achieves $1/2$-approximation guarantee for this constraint. Finally, we extend our results to the general case of maximizing a monotone submodular function subject to the intersection of a $p$-set system and multiple knapsack constraints. We extensively evaluate the performance of our algorithms on multiple real-life machine learning applications, including movie recommendation, location summarization, twitter text summarization and video summarization.
Video summarization is among challenging tasks in computer vision, which aims at identifying highlight frames or shots over a lengthy video input. In this paper, we propose an novel attention-based framework for video summarization with complex video data. Unlike previous works which only apply attention mechanism on the correspondence between frames, our multi-concept video self-attention (MC-VSA) model is presented to identify informative regions across temporal and concept video features, which jointly exploit context diversity over time and space for summarization purposes. Together with consistency between video and summary enforced in our framework, our model can be applied to both labeled and unlabeled data, making our method preferable to real-world applications. Extensive and complete experiments on two benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of our model both quantitatively and qualitatively, and confirms its superiority over the stateof-the-arts.
Video is an essential imaging modality for diagnostics, e.g. in ultrasound imaging, for endoscopy, or movement assessment. However, video hasn't received a lot of attention in the medical image analysis community. In the clinical practice, it is challenging to utilise raw diagnostic video data efficiently as video data takes a long time to process, annotate or audit. In this paper we introduce a novel, fully automatic video summarization method that is tailored to the needs of medical video data. Our approach is framed as reinforcement learning problem and produces agents focusing on the preservation of important diagnostic information. We evaluate our method on videos from fetal ultrasound screening, where commonly only a small amount of the recorded data is used diagnostically. We show that our method is superior to alternative video summarization methods and that it preserves essential information required by clinical diagnostic standards.
This thesis surveys the research in patch-based synthesis and algorithms for finding correspondences between small local regions of images. We additionally explore a large kind of applications of this new fast randomized matching technique. One of the algorithms we have studied in particular is PatchMatch, can find similar regions or "patches" of an image one to two orders of magnitude faster than previous techniques. The algorithmic program is driven by applying mathematical properties of nearest neighbors in natural images. It is observed that neighboring correspondences tend to be similar or "coherent" and use this observation in algorithm in order to quickly converge to an approximate solution. The algorithm is the most general form can find k-nearest neighbor matching, using patches that translate, rotate, or scale, using arbitrary descriptors, and between two or more images. Speed-ups are obtained over various techniques in an exceeding range of those areas. We have explored many applications of PatchMatch matching algorithm. In computer graphics, we have explored removing unwanted objects from images, seamlessly moving objects in images, changing image aspect ratios, and video summarization. In computer vision we have explored denoising images, object detection, detecting image forgeries, and detecting symmetries. We conclude by discussing the restrictions of our algorithmic program, GPU implementation and areas for future analysis.
Mass utilization of body-worn cameras has led to a huge corpus of available egocentric video. Existing video summarization algorithms can accelerate browsing such videos by selecting (visually) interesting shots from them. Nonetheless, since the system user still has to watch the summary videos, browsing large video databases remain a challenge. Hence, in this work, we propose to generate a textual synopsis, consisting of a few sentences describing the most important events in a long egocentric videos. Users can read the short text to gain insight about the video, and more importantly, efficiently search through the content of a large video database using text queries. Since egocentric videos are long and contain many activities and events, using video-to-text algorithms results in thousands of descriptions, many of which are incorrect. Therefore, we propose a multi-task learning scheme to simultaneously generate descriptions for video segments and summarize the resulting descriptions in an end-to-end fashion. We Input a set of video shots and the network generates a text description for each shot. Next, visual-language content matching unit that is trained with a weakly supervised objective, identifies the correct descriptions. Finally, the last component of our network, called purport network, evaluates the descriptions all together to select the ones containing crucial information. Out of thousands of descriptions generated for the video, a few informative sentences are returned to the user. We validate our framework on the challenging UT Egocentric video dataset, where each video is between 3 to 5 hours long, associated with over 3000 textual descriptions on average. The generated textual summaries, including only 5 percent (or less) of the generated descriptions, are compared to groundtruth summaries in text domain using well-established metrics in natural language processing.
When video collections become huge, how to explore both within and across videos efficiently is challenging. Video summarization is one of the ways to tackle this issue. Traditional summarization approaches limit the effectiveness of video exploration because they only generate one fixed video summary for a given input video independent of the information need of the user. In this work, we introduce a method which takes a text-based query as input and generates a video summary corresponding to it. We do so by modeling video summarization as a supervised learning problem and propose an end-to-end deep learning based method for query-controllable video summarization to generate a query-dependent video summary. Our proposed method consists of a video summary controller, video summary generator, and video summary output module. To foster the research of query-controllable video summarization and conduct our experiments, we introduce a dataset that contains frame-based relevance score labels. Based on our experimental result, it shows that the text-based query helps control the video summary. It also shows the text-based query improves our model performance. Our code and dataset: https://github.com/Jhhuangkay/Query-controllable-Video-Summarization.
Previous approaches for video summarization mainly concentrate on finding the most diverse and representative visual contents as video summary without considering the user's preference. This paper addresses the task of query-focused video summarization, which takes user's query and a long video as inputs and aims to generate a query-focused video summary. In this paper, we consider the task as a problem of computing similarity between video shots and query. To this end, we propose a method, named Convolutional Hierarchical Attention Network (CHAN), which consists of two parts: feature encoding network and query-relevance computing module. In the encoding network, we employ a convolutional network with local self-attention mechanism and query-aware global attention mechanism to learns visual information of each shot. The encoded features will be sent to query-relevance computing module to generate queryfocused video summary. Extensive experiments on the benchmark dataset demonstrate the competitive performance and show the effectiveness of our approach.
Conventional video summarization approaches based on reinforcement learning have the problem that the reward can only be received after the whole summary is generated. Such kind of reward is sparse and it makes reinforcement learning hard to converge. Another problem is that labelling each frame is tedious and costly, which usually prohibits the construction of large-scale datasets. To solve these problems, we propose a weakly supervised hierarchical reinforcement learning framework, which decomposes the whole task into several subtasks to enhance the summarization quality. This framework consists of a manager network and a worker network. For each subtask, the manager is trained to set a subgoal only by a task-level binary label, which requires much fewer labels than conventional approaches. With the guide of the subgoal, the worker predicts the importance scores for video frames in the subtask by policy gradient according to both global reward and innovative defined sub-rewards to overcome the sparse problem. Experiments on two benchmark datasets show that our proposal has achieved the best performance, even better than supervised approaches.
Effective learning with audiovisual content depends on many factors. Besides the quality of the learning resource's content, it is essential to discover the most relevant and suitable video in order to support the learning process most effectively. Video summarization techniques facilitate this goal by providing a quick overview over the content. It is especially useful for longer recordings such as conference presentations or lectures. In this paper, we present an approach that generates a visual summary of video content based on semantic word embeddings and keyphrase extraction. For this purpose, we exploit video annotations that are automatically generated by speech recognition and video OCR (optical character recognition).