No Arabic abstract
Most natural videos contain numerous events. For example, in a video of a man playing a piano, the video might also contain another man dancing or a crowd clapping. We introduce the task of dense-captioning events, which involves both detecting and describing events in a video. We propose a new model that is able to identify all events in a single pass of the video while simultaneously describing the detected events with natural language. Our model introduces a variant of an existing proposal module that is designed to capture both short as well as long events that span minutes. To capture the dependencies between the events in a video, our model introduces a new captioning module that uses contextual information from past and future events to jointly describe all events. We also introduce ActivityNet Captions, a large-scale benchmark for dense-captioning events. ActivityNet Captions contains 20k videos amounting to 849 video hours with 100k total descriptions, each with its unique start and end time. Finally, we report performances of our model for dense-captioning events, video retrieval and localization.
Video paragraph captioning aims to describe multiple events in untrimmed videos with descriptive paragraphs. Existing approaches mainly solve the problem in two steps: event detection and then event captioning. Such two-step manner makes the quality of generated paragraphs highly dependent on the accuracy of event proposal detection which is already a challenging task. In this paper, we propose a paragraph captioning model which eschews the problematic event detection stage and directly generates paragraphs for untrimmed videos. To describe coherent and diverse events, we propose to enhance the conventional temporal attention with dynamic video memories, which progressively exposes new video features and suppresses over-accessed video contents to control visual focuses of the model. In addition, a diversity-driven training strategy is proposed to improve diversity of paragraph on the language perspective. Considering that untrimmed videos generally contain massive but redundant frames, we further augment the video encoder with keyframe awareness to improve efficiency. Experimental results on the ActivityNet and Charades datasets show that our proposed model significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art performance on both accuracy and diversity metrics without using any event boundary annotations. Code will be released at https://github.com/syuqings/video-paragraph.
We introduce the task of dense captioning in 3D scans from commodity RGB-D sensors. As input, we assume a point cloud of a 3D scene; the expected output is the bounding boxes along with the descriptions for the underlying objects. To address the 3D object detection and description problems, we propose Scan2Cap, an end-to-end trained method, to detect objects in the input scene and describe them in natural language. We use an attention mechanism that generates descriptive tokens while referring to the related components in the local context. To reflect object relations (i.e. relative spatial relations) in the generated captions, we use a message passing graph module to facilitate learning object relation features. Our method can effectively localize and describe 3D objects in scenes from the ScanRefer dataset, outperforming 2D baseline methods by a significant margin (27.61%
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Multi-person event recognition is a challenging task, often with many people active in the scene but only a small subset contributing to an actual event. In this paper, we propose a model which learns to detect events in such videos while automatically attending to the people responsible for the event. Our model does not use explicit annotations regarding who or where those people are during training and testing. In particular, we track people in videos and use a recurrent neural network (RNN) to represent the track features. We learn time-varying attention weights to combine these features at each time-instant. The attended features are then processed using another RNN for event detection/classification. Since most video datasets with multiple people are restricted to a small number of videos, we also collected a new basketball dataset comprising 257 basketball games with 14K event annotations corresponding to 11 event classes. Our model outperforms state-of-the-art methods for both event classification and detection on this new dataset. Additionally, we show that the attention mechanism is able to consistently localize the relevant players.
Dense video captioning aims to generate multiple associated captions with their temporal locations from the video. Previous methods follow a sophisticated localize-then-describe scheme, which heavily relies on numerous hand-crafted components. In this paper, we proposed a simple yet effective framework for end-to-end dense video captioning with parallel decoding (PDVC), by formulating the dense caption generation as a set prediction task. In practice, through stacking a newly proposed event counter on the top of a transformer decoder, the PDVC precisely segments the video into a number of event pieces under the holistic understanding of the video content, which effectively increases the coherence and readability of predicted captions. Compared with prior arts, the PDVC has several appealing advantages: (1) Without relying on heuristic non-maximum suppression or a recurrent event sequence selection network to remove redundancy, PDVC directly produces an event set with an appropriate size; (2) In contrast to adopting the two-stage scheme, we feed the enhanced representations of event queries into the localization head and caption head in parallel, making these two sub-tasks deeply interrelated and mutually promoted through the optimization; (3) Without bells and whistles, extensive experiments on ActivityNet Captions and YouCook2 show that PDVC is capable of producing high-quality captioning results, surpassing the state-of-the-art two-stage methods when its localization accuracy is on par with them. Code is available at https://github.com/ttengwang/PDVC.
With the advent of drones, aerial video analysis becomes increasingly important; yet, it has received scant attention in the literature. This paper addresses a new problem of parsing low-resolution aerial videos of large spatial areas, in terms of 1) grouping, 2) recognizing events and 3) assigning roles to people engaged in events. We propose a novel framework aimed at conducting joint inference of the above tasks, as reasoning about each in isolation typically fails in our setting. Given noisy tracklets of people and detections of large objects and scene surfaces (e.g., building, grass), we use a spatiotemporal AND-OR graph to drive our joint inference, using Markov Chain Monte Carlo and dynamic programming. We also introduce a new formalism of spatiotemporal templates characterizing latent sub-events. For evaluation, we have collected and released a new aerial videos dataset using a hex-rotor flying over picnic areas rich with group events. Our results demonstrate that we successfully address above inference tasks under challenging conditions.