Text-Driven Video Acceleration: A Weakly-Supervised Reinforcement Learning Method

The growth of videos in our digital age and the users' limited time raise the demand for processing untrimmed videos to produce shorter versions conveying the same information. Despite the remarkable progress that summarization methods have made, most of them can only select a few frames or skims, creating visual gaps and breaking the video context. This paper presents a novel weakly-supervised methodology based on a reinforcement learning formulation to accelerate instructional videos using text. A novel joint reward function guides our agent to select which frames to remove and reduce the input video to a target length without creating gaps in the final video. We also propose the Extended Visually-guided Document Attention Network (VDAN+), which can generate a highly discriminative embedding space to represent both textual and visual data. Our experiments show that our method achieves the best performance in Precision, Recall, and F1 Score against the baselines while effectively controlling the video's output length. Visit https://www.verlab.dcc.ufmg.br/semantic-hyperlapse/tpami2022/ for code and extra results.

Straight to the Point: Fast-forwarding Videos via Reinforcement Learning Using Textual Data

The rapid increase in the amount of published visual data and the limited time of users bring the demand for processing untrimmed videos to produce shorter versions that convey the same information. Despite the remarkable progress that has been made by summarization methods, most of them can only select a few frames or skims, which creates visual gaps and breaks the video context. In this paper, we present a novel methodology based on a reinforcement learning formulation to accelerate instructional videos. Our approach can adaptively select frames that are not relevant to convey the information without creating gaps in the final video. Our agent is textually and visually oriented to select which frames to remove to shrink the input video. Additionally, we propose a novel network, called Visually-guided Document Attention Network (VDAN), able to generate a highly discriminative embedding space to represent both textual and visual data. Our experiments show that our method achieves the best performance in terms of F1 Score and coverage at the video segment level.