Exploiting the temporal dependency among video frames or subshots is very important for the task of video summarization. Practically, RNN is good at temporal dependency modeling, and has achieved overwhelming performance in many video-based tasks, such as video captioning and classification. However, RNN is not capable enough to handle the video summarization task, since traditional RNNs, including LSTM, can only deal with short videos, while the videos in the summarization task are usually in longer duration. To address this problem, we propose a hierarchical recurrent neural network for video summarization, called H-RNN in this paper. Specifically, it has two layers, where the first layer is utilized to encode short video subshots cut from the original video, and the final hidden state of each subshot is input to the second layer for calculating its confidence to be a key subshot. Compared to traditional RNNs, H-RNN is more suitable to video summarization, since it can exploit long temporal dependency among frames, meanwhile, the computation operations are significantly lessened. The results on two popular datasets, including the Combined dataset and VTW dataset, have demonstrated that the proposed H-RNN outperforms the state-of-the-arts.
@cite_21: With the development of imaging techniques and the Internet, it is hard to effectively and efficiently manage, index and store large amounts of videos. Video summarization appears to this need by obtaining useful information in videos. Recently, the reconstruction concept has been introduced into video summarization. However, most of these existing reconstruction methods where a dictionary of key frames is selected to reconstruct the original video best might come up with redundant information. In this paper, we propose a novel framework named Video Summarization based on Nonnegative Linear Reconstruction (VSNLR) which allows only additive, not subtractive, linear combinations. Our approach consists of two core steps: (1) we detect the shot boundary and choose a representative frame for every shot, then all the representative frames form the candidate set; (2) for every frame in the candidate set, VSNLR selects related frames to reconstruct the given frame by using the nonnegative linear reconstruction function. The key frames are selected by minimizing the sum of reconstruction errors. Experiments on a dataset and comparison to the state-of-art method demonstrate our advantage.
@cite_1: We consider the problem of finding a few representatives for a dataset, i.e., a subset of data points that efficiently describes the entire dataset. We assume that each data point can be expressed as a linear combination of the representatives and formulate the problem of finding the representatives as a sparse multiple measurement vector problem. In our formulation, both the dictionary and the measurements are given by the data matrix, and the unknown sparse codes select the representatives via convex optimization. In general, we do not assume that the data are low-rank or distributed around cluster centers. When the data do come from a collection of low-rank models, we show that our method automatically selects a few representatives from each low-rank model. We also analyze the geometry of the representatives and discuss their relationship to the vertices of the convex hull of the data. We show that our framework can be extended to detect and reject outliers in datasets, and to efficiently deal with new observations and large datasets. The proposed framework and theoretical foundations are illustrated with examples in video summarization and image classification using representatives.
@cite_32: With the widespread availability of video cameras, we are facing an ever-growing enormous collection of unedited and unstructured video data. Due to lack of an automatic way to generate summaries from this large collection of consumer videos, they can be tedious and time consuming to index or search. In this work, we propose online video highlighting, a principled way of generating short video summarizing the most important and interesting contents of an unedited and unstructured video, costly both time-wise and financially for manual processing. Specifically, our method learns a dictionary from given video using group sparse coding, and updates atoms in the dictionary on-the-fly. A summary video is then generated by combining segments that cannot be sparsely reconstructed using the learned dictionary. The online fashion of our proposed method enables it to process arbitrarily long videos and start generating summaries before seeing the end of the video. Moreover, the processing time required by our proposed method is close to the original video length, achieving quasi real-time summarization speed. Theoretical analysis, together with experimental results on more than 12 hours of surveillance and YouTube videos are provided, demonstrating the effectiveness of online video highlighting.
@cite_3: The rapid growth of consumer videos requires an effective and efficient content summarization method to provide a user-friendly way to manage and browse the huge amount of video data. Compared with most previous methods that focus on sports and news videos, the summarization of personal videos is more challenging because of its unconstrained content and the lack of any pre-imposed video structures. We formulate video summarization as a novel dictionary selection problem using sparsity consistency, where a dictionary of key frames is selected such that the original video can be best reconstructed from this representative dictionary. An efficient global optimization algorithm is introduced to solve the dictionary selection model with the convergence rates as O(1 K2) (where K is the iteration counter), in contrast to traditional sub-gradient descent methods of O(1 √K). Our method provides a scalable solution for both key frame extraction and video skim generation, because one can select an arbitrary number of key frames to represent the original videos. Experiments on a human labeled benchmark dataset and comparisons to the state-of-the-art methods demonstrate the advantages of our algorithm.
@cite_15: Video summarization helps users obtain quick comprehension of video content. Recently, some studies have utilized local features to represent each video frame and formulate video summarization as a coverage problem of local features. However, the importance of individual local features has not been exploited. In this paper, we propose a novel Bag-of-Importance (BoI) model for static video summarization by identifying the frames with important local features as keyframes, which is one of the first studies formulating video summarization at local feature level, instead of at global feature level. That is, by representing each frame with local features, a video is characterized with a bag of local features weighted with individual importance scores and the frames with more important local features are more representative, where the representativeness of each frame is the aggregation of the weighted importance of the local features contained in the frame. In addition, we propose to learn a transformation from a raw local feature to a more powerful sparse nonlinear representation for deriving the importance score of each local feature, rather than directly utilize the hand-crafted visual features like most of the existing approaches. Specifically, we first employ locality-constrained linear coding (LCC) to project each local feature into a sparse transformed space. LCC is able to take advantage of the manifold geometric structure of the high dimensional feature space and form the manifold of the low dimensional transformed space with the coordinates of a set of anchor points. Then we calculate the l2 norm of each anchor point as the importance score of each local feature which is projected to the anchor point. Finally, the distribution of the importance scores of all the local features in a video is obtained as the BoI representation of the video. We further differentiate the importance of local features with a spatial weighting template by taking the perceptual difference among spatial regions of a frame into account. As a result, our proposed video summarization approach is able to exploit both the inter-frame and intra-frame properties of feature representations and identify keyframes capturing both the dominant content and discriminative details within a video. Experimental results on three video datasets across various genres demonstrate that the proposed approach clearly outperforms several state-of-the-art methods.
Dictionary learning is another important unsupervised summarization approach @cite_1 @cite_21 @cite_32 @cite_3 . This kind of approaches seek to select a few key subshots to compose a compact dictionary so as to represent the video content. @cite_1 supposes that the original video can be reconstructed by its summary sparsely. Based on this point, the summary is generated by sparse coding. Furthermore, the Locality-constrained Linear Coding (LLC) is introduced to @cite_15 to preserve the local similarity of video subshots when reconstructing the original video. Besides, to improve the efficiency, @cite_32 propose a quasi real-time dictionary learning approach to summarize the video, which updates the video summary on-the-fly by adding those elements that cannot be well reconstructed by current video summary.