Video captioning aims to automatically generate natural language descriptions of video content, which has drawn a lot of attention recent years. Generating accurate and fine-grained captions needs to not only understand the global content of video, but also capture the detailed object information. Meanwhile, video representations have great impact on the quality of generated captions. Thus, it is important for video captioning to capture salient objects with their detailed temporal dynamics, and represent them using discriminative spatio-temporal representations. In this paper, we propose a new video captioning approach based on object-aware aggregation with bidirectional temporal graph (OA-BTG), which captures detailed temporal dynamics for salient objects in video, and learns discriminative spatio-temporal representations by performing object-aware local feature aggregation on detected object regions. The main novelties and advantages are: (1) Bidirectional temporal graph: A bidirectional temporal graph is constructed along and reversely along the temporal order, which provides complementary ways to capture the temporal trajectories for each salient object. (2) Object-aware aggregation: Learnable VLAD (Vector of Locally Aggregated Descriptors) models are constructed on object temporal trajectories and global frame sequence, which performs object-aware aggregation to learn discriminative representations. A hierarchical attention mechanism is also developed to distinguish different contributions of multiple objects. Experiments on two widely-used datasets demonstrate our OA-BTG achieves state-of-the-art performance in terms of BLEU@4, METEOR and CIDEr metrics.
@cite_35: 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_38: Fusion of multiple features can boost the performance of large-scale visual classification and detection tasks like TRECVID Multimedia Event Detection (MED) competition [1]. In this paper, we propose a novel feature fusion approach, namely Feature Weighting via Optimal Thresholding (FWOT) to effectively fuse various features. FWOT learns the weights, thresholding and smoothing parameters in a joint framework to combine the decision values obtained from all the individual features and the early fusion. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to consider the weight and threshold factors of fusion problem simultaneously. Compared to state-of-the-art fusion algorithms, our approach achieves promising improvements on HMDB [8] action recognition dataset and CCV [5] video classification dataset. In addition, experiments on two TRECVID MED 2011 collections show that our approach outperforms the state-of-the-art fusion methods for complex event detection.
@cite_36: 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_15: 
@cite_25: 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_20: Video captioning which automatically translates video clips into natural language sentences is a very important task in computer vision. By virtue of recent deep learning technologies, video captioning has made great progress. However, learning an effective mapping from the visual sequence space to the language space is still a challenging problem due to the long-term multimodal dependency modelling and semantic misalignment. Inspired by the facts that memory modelling poses potential advantages to long-term sequential problems [35] and working memory is the key factor of visual attention [33], we propose a Multimodal Memory Model (M3) to describe videos, which builds a visual and textual shared memory to model the long-term visual-textual dependency and further guide visual attention on described visual targets to solve visual-textual alignments. Specifically, similar to [10], the proposed M3 attaches an external memory to store and retrieve both visual and textual contents by interacting with video and sentence with multiple read and write operations. To evaluate the proposed model, we perform experiments on two public datasets: MSVD and MSR-VTT. The experimental results demonstrate that our method outperforms most of the state-of-the-art methods in terms of BLEU and METEOR.
@cite_11: We propose a simple, yet effective approach for spatiotemporal feature learning using deep 3-dimensional convolutional networks (3D ConvNets) trained on a large scale supervised video dataset. Our findings are three-fold: 1) 3D ConvNets are more suitable for spatiotemporal feature learning compared to 2D ConvNets, 2) A homogeneous architecture with small 3x3x3 convolution kernels in all layers is among the best performing architectures for 3D ConvNets, and 3) Our learned features, namely C3D (Convolutional 3D), with a simple linear classifier outperform state-of-the-art methods on 4 different benchmarks and are comparable with current best methods on the other 2 benchmarks. In addition, the features are compact: achieving 52.8 accuracy on UCF101 dataset with only 10 dimensions and also very efficient to compute due to the fast inference of ConvNets. Finally, they are conceptually very simple and easy to train and use.
There are also some works @cite_20 @cite_36 @cite_35 @cite_25 @cite_15 that exploit multi-modal features for video captioning. Besides frame features extracted by popular 2D CNNs, they also exploit motion features extracted by C3D @cite_11 or audio features @cite_38 , where they mine the complementarities among multi-modal information to boost the video captioning performance. Different from them, our OA-BTG approach takes only visual features, which mainly focuses on capturing detailed temporal evolutions of objects by bidirectional temporal graph and learning discriminative features through object-aware feature aggregation.