Automatically generating a natural language sentence to describe the content of an input video is a very challenging problem. It is an essential multimodal task in which auditory and visual contents are equally important. Although audio information has been exploited to improve video captioning in previous works, it is usually regarded as an additional feature fed into a black box fusion machine. How are the words in the generated sentences associated with the auditory and visual modalities? The problem is still not investigated. In this paper, we make the first attempt to design an interpretable audio-visual video captioning network to discover the association between words in sentences and audio-visual sequences. To achieve this, we propose a multimodal convolutional neural network-based audio-visual video captioning framework and introduce a modality-aware module for exploring modality selection during sentence generation. Besides, we collect new audio captioning and visual captioning datasets for further exploring the interactions between auditory and visual modalities for high-level video understanding. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the modality-aware module makes our model interpretable on modality selection during sentence generation. Even with the added interpretability, our video captioning network can still achieve comparable performance with recent state-of-the-art methods.
@cite_53: Automatic generation of video caption is a challenging task as video is an information-intensive media with complex variations. Most existing methods, either based on language templates or sequence learning, have treated video as a flat data sequence while ignoring intrinsic multimodality nature. Observing that different modalities (e.g., frame, motion, and audio streams), as well as the elements within each modality, contribute differently to the sentence generation, we present a novel deep framework to boost video captioning by learning Multimodal Attention Long-Short Term Memory networks (MA-LSTM). Our proposed MA-LSTM fully exploits both multimodal streams and temporal attention to selectively focus on specific elements during the sentence generation. Moreover, we design a novel child-sum fusion unit in the MA-LSTM to effectively combine different encoded modalities to the initial decoding states. Different from existing approaches that employ the same LSTM structure for different modalities, we train modality-specific LSTM to capture the intrinsic representations of individual modalities. The experiments on two benchmark datasets (MSVD and MSR-VTT) show that our MA-LSTM significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art methods with 52.3 BLEU@4 and 70.4 CIDER-D metrics on MSVD dataset, respectively.
@cite_32: Current methods for video description are based on encoder-decoder sentence generation using recurrent neural networks (RNNs). Recent work has demonstrated the advantages of integrating temporal attention mechanisms into these models, in which the decoder network predicts each word in the description by selectively giving more weight to encoded features from specific time frames. Such methods typically use two different types of features: image features (from an object classification model), and motion features (from an action recognition model), combined by naive concatenation in the model input. Because different feature modalities may carry task-relevant information at different times, fusing them by naive concatenation may limit the model's ability to dynamically determine the relevance of each type of feature to different parts of the description. In this paper, we incorporate audio features in addition to the image and motion features. To fuse these three modalities, we introduce a multimodal attention model that can selectively utilize features from different modalities for each word in the output description. Combining our new multimodal attention model with standard temporal attention outperforms state-of-the-art methods on two standard datasets: YouTube2Text and MSR-VTT.
@cite_52: The topic diversity of open-domain videos leads to various vocabularies and linguistic expressions in describing video contents, and therefore, makes the video captioning task even more challenging. In this paper, we propose an unified caption framework, M&M TGM, which mines multimodal topics in unsupervised fashion from data and guides the caption decoder with these topics. Compared to pre-defined topics, the mined multimodal topics are more semantically and visually coherent and can reflect the topic distribution of videos better. We formulate the topic-aware caption generation as a multi-task learning problem, in which we add a parallel task, topic prediction, in addition to the caption task. For the topic prediction task, we use the mined topics as the teacher to train a student topic prediction model, which learns to predict the latent topics from multimodal contents of videos. The topic prediction provides intermediate supervision to the learning process. As for the caption task, we propose a novel topic-aware decoder to generate more accurate and detailed video descriptions with the guidance from latent topics. The entire learning procedure is end-to-end and it optimizes both tasks simultaneously. The results from extensive experiments conducted on the MSR-VTT and Youtube2Text datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed model. M&M TGM not only outperforms prior state-of-the-art methods on multiple evaluation metrics and on both benchmark datasets, but also achieves better generalization ability.
@cite_19: This paper focuses on a novel and challenging vision task, dense video captioning, which aims to automatically describe a video clip with multiple informative and diverse caption sentences. The proposed method is trained without explicit annotation of fine-grained sentence to video region-sequence correspondence, but is only based on weak video-level sentence annotations. It differs from existing video captioning systems in three technical aspects. First, we propose lexical fully convolutional neural networks (Lexical-FCN) with weakly supervised multi-instance multi-label learning to weakly link video regions with lexical labels. Second, we introduce a novel submodular maximization scheme to generate multiple informative and diverse region-sequences based on the Lexical-FCN outputs. A winner-takes-all scheme is adopted to weakly associate sentences to region-sequences in the training phase. Third, a sequence-to-sequence learning based language model is trained with the weakly supervised information obtained through the association process. We show that the proposed method can not only produce informative and diverse dense captions, but also outperform state-of-the-art single video captioning methods by a large margin.
@cite_27: Describing videos with natural language is one of the ultimate goals of video understanding. Video records multi-modal information including image, motion, aural, speech and so on. MSR Video to Language Challenge provides a good chance to study multi-modality fusion in caption task. In this paper, we propose the multi-modal fusion encoder and integrate it with text sequence decoder into an end-to-end video caption framework. Features from visual, aural, speech and meta modalities are fused together to represent the video contents. Long Short-Term Memory Recurrent Neural Networks (LSTM-RNNs) are then used as the decoder to generate natural language sentences. Experimental results show the effectiveness of multi-modal fusion encoder trained in the end-to-end framework, which achieved top performance in both common metrics evaluation and human evaluation.
@cite_40: A major challenge for video captioning is to combine audio and visual cues. Existing multi-modal fusion methods have shown encouraging results in video understanding. However, the temporal structures of multiple modalities at different granularities are rarely explored, and how to selectively fuse the multi-modal representations at different levels of details remains uncharted. In this paper, we propose a novel hierarchically aligned cross-modal attention (HACA) framework to learn and selectively fuse both global and local temporal dynamics of different modalities. Furthermore, for the first time, we validate the superior performance of the deep audio features on the video captioning task. Finally, our HACA model significantly outperforms the previous best systems and achieves new state-of-the-art results on the widely used MSR-VTT dataset.
@cite_31: Real-world web videos often contain cues to supplement visual information for generating natural language descriptions. In this paper we propose a sequence-to-sequence model which explores such auxiliary information. In particular, audio and the topic of the video are used in addition to the visual information in a multimodal framework to generate coherent descriptions of videos "in the wild". In contrast to current encoder-decoder based models which exploit visual information only during the encoding stage, our model fuses multiple sources of information judiciously, showing improvement over using the different modalities separately. We based our multimodal video description network on the state-of-the-art sequence to sequence video to text (S2VT) model and extended it to take advantage of multiple modalities. Extensive experiments on the challenging MSR-VTT dataset are carried out to show the superior performance of the proposed approach on natural videos found in the web.
Excepting the visual content, auditory modality and video tags have also been demonstrated that it can help to improve video captioning performance in @cite_27 @cite_31 @cite_52 @cite_53 @cite_32 @cite_19 @cite_40 . Naive fusion ( concatenation in @cite_31 ) and attention fusion ( @cite_32 ) are utilized in these methods to aggregate features from different modalities. Although these methods exploit the audio information, they fail to completely analyze the two modalities for video captioning due to essential difficulties existing in their RNN decoder-based frameworks.