A Reinforcement Learning-Based Automatic Video Editing Method Using Pre-trained Vision-Language Model

In this era of videos, automatic video editing techniques attract more and more attention from industry and academia since they can reduce workloads and lower the requirements for human editors. Existing automatic editing systems are mainly scene- or event-specific, e.g., soccer game broadcasting, yet the automatic systems for general editing, e.g., movie or vlog editing which covers various scenes and events, were rarely studied before, and converting the event-driven editing method to a general scene is nontrivial. In this paper, we propose a two-stage scheme for general editing. Firstly, unlike previous works that extract scene-specific features, we leverage the pre-trained Vision-Language Model (VLM) to extract the editing-relevant representations as editing context. Moreover, to close the gap between the professional-looking videos and the automatic productions generated with simple guidelines, we propose a Reinforcement Learning (RL)-based editing framework to formulate the editing problem and train the virtual editor to make better sequential editing decisions. Finally, we evaluate the proposed method on a more general editing task with a real movie dataset. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness and benefits of the proposed context representation and the learning ability of our RL-based editing framework.

StoryAgent: Customized Storytelling Video Generation via Multi-Agent Collaboration

The advent of AI-Generated Content (AIGC) has spurred research into automated video generation to streamline conventional processes. However, automating storytelling video production, particularly for customized narratives, remains challenging due to the complexity of maintaining subject consistency across shots. While existing approaches like Mora and AesopAgent integrate multiple agents for Story-to-Video (S2V) generation, they fall short in preserving protagonist consistency and supporting Customized Storytelling Video Generation (CSVG). To address these limitations, we propose StoryAgent, a multi-agent framework designed for CSVG. StoryAgent decomposes CSVG into distinct subtasks assigned to specialized agents, mirroring the professional production process. Notably, our framework includes agents for story design, storyboard generation, video creation, agent coordination, and result evaluation. Leveraging the strengths of different models, StoryAgent enhances control over the generation process, significantly improving character consistency. Specifically, we introduce a customized Image-to-Video (I2V) method, LoRA-BE, to enhance intra-shot temporal consistency, while a novel storyboard generation pipeline is proposed to maintain subject consistency across shots. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach in synthesizing highly consistent storytelling videos, outperforming state-of-the-art methods. Our contributions include the introduction of StoryAgent, a versatile framework for video generation tasks, and novel techniques for preserving protagonist consistency.

A multi-purpose automatic editing system based on lecture semantics for remote education

Remote teaching has become popular recently due to its convenience and safety, especially under extreme circumstances like a pandemic. However, online students usually have a poor experience since the information acquired from the views provided by the broadcast platforms is limited. One potential solution is to show more camera views simultaneously, but it is technically challenging and distracting for the viewers. Therefore, an automatic multi-camera directing/editing system, which aims at selecting the most concerned view at each time instance to guide the attention of online students, is in urgent demand. However, existing systems mostly make simple assumptions and focus on tracking the position of the speaker instead of the real lecture semantics, and therefore have limited capacities to deliver optimal information flow. To this end, this paper proposes an automatic multi-purpose editing system based on the lecture semantics, which can both direct the multiple video streams for real-time broadcasting and edit the optimal video offline for review purposes. Our system directs the views by semantically analyzing the class events while following the professional directing rules, mimicking a human director to capture the regions of interest from the viewpoint of the onsite students. We conduct both qualitative and quantitative analyses to verify the effectiveness of the proposed system and its components.

Sitcom-Crafter: A Plot-Driven Human Motion Generation System in 3D Scenes

Recent advancements in human motion synthesis have focused on specific types of motions, such as human-scene interaction, locomotion or human-human interaction, however, there is a lack of a unified system capable of generating a diverse combination of motion types. In response, we introduce Sitcom-Crafter, a comprehensive and extendable system for human motion generation in 3D space, which can be guided by extensive plot contexts to enhance workflow efficiency for anime and game designers. The system is comprised of eight modules, three of which are dedicated to motion generation, while the remaining five are augmentation modules that ensure consistent fusion of motion sequences and system functionality. Central to the generation modules is our novel 3D scene-aware human-human interaction module, which addresses collision issues by synthesizing implicit 3D Signed Distance Function (SDF) points around motion spaces, thereby minimizing human-scene collisions without additional data collection costs. Complementing this, our locomotion and human-scene interaction modules leverage existing methods to enrich the system's motion generation capabilities. Augmentation modules encompass plot comprehension for command generation, motion synchronization for seamless integration of different motion types, hand pose retrieval to enhance motion realism, motion collision revision to prevent human collisions, and 3D retargeting to ensure visual fidelity. Experimental evaluations validate the system's ability to generate high-quality, diverse, and physically realistic motions, underscoring its potential for advancing creative workflows.

EasyControl: Transfer ControlNet to Video Diffusion for Controllable Generation and Interpolation

Following the advancements in text-guided image generation technology exemplified by Stable Diffusion, video generation is gaining increased attention in the academic community. However, relying solely on text guidance for video generation has serious limitations, as videos contain much richer content than images, especially in terms of motion. This information can hardly be adequately described with plain text. Fortunately, in computer vision, various visual representations can serve as additional control signals to guide generation. With the help of these signals, video generation can be controlled in finer detail, allowing for greater flexibility for different applications. Integrating various controls, however, is nontrivial. In this paper, we propose a universal framework called EasyControl. By propagating and injecting condition features through condition adapters, our method enables users to control video generation with a single condition map. With our framework, various conditions including raw pixels, depth, HED, etc., can be integrated into different Unet-based pre-trained video diffusion models at a low practical cost. We conduct comprehensive experiments on public datasets, and both quantitative and qualitative results indicate that our method outperforms state-of-the-art methods. EasyControl significantly improves various evaluation metrics across multiple validation datasets compared to previous works. Specifically, for the sketch-to-video generation task, EasyControl achieves an improvement of 152.0 on FVD and 19.9 on IS, respectively, in UCF101 compared with VideoComposer. For fidelity, our model demonstrates powerful image retention ability, resulting in high FVD and IS in UCF101 and MSR-VTT compared to other image-to-video models.

Towards Balanced RGB-TSDF Fusion for Consistent Semantic Scene Completion by 3D RGB Feature Completion and a Classwise Entropy Loss Function

Semantic Scene Completion (SSC) aims to jointly infer semantics and occupancies of 3D scenes. Truncated Signed Distance Function (TSDF), a 3D encoding of depth, has been a common input for SSC. Furthermore, RGB-TSDF fusion, seems promising since these two modalities provide color and geometry information, respectively. Nevertheless, RGB-TSDF fusion has been considered nontrivial and commonly-used naive addition will result in inconsistent results. We argue that the inconsistency comes from the sparsity of RGB features upon projecting into 3D space, while TSDF features are dense, leading to imbalanced feature maps when summed up. To address this RGB-TSDF distribution difference, we propose a two-stage network with a 3D RGB feature completion module that completes RGB features with meaningful values for occluded areas. Moreover, we propose an effective classwise entropy loss function to punish inconsistency. Extensive experiments on public datasets verify that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance among methods that do not adopt extra data.

DreamVideo: High-Fidelity Image-to-Video Generation with Image Retention and Text Guidance

Image-to-video generation, which aims to generate a video starting from a given reference image, has drawn great attention. Existing methods try to extend pre-trained text-guided image diffusion models to image-guided video generation models. Nevertheless, these methods often result in either low fidelity or flickering over time due to their limitation to shallow image guidance and poor temporal consistency. To tackle these problems, we propose a high-fidelity image-to-video generation method by devising a frame retention branch on the basis of a pre-trained video diffusion model, named DreamVideo. Instead of integrating the reference image into the diffusion process in a semantic level, our DreamVideo perceives the reference image via convolution layers and concatenate the features with the noisy latents as model input. By this means, the details of the reference image can be preserved to the greatest extent. In addition, by incorporating double-condition classifier-free guidance, a single image can be directed to videos of different actions by providing varying prompt texts. This has significant implications for controllable video generation and holds broad application prospects. We conduct comprehensive experiments on the public dataset, both quantitative and qualitative results indicate that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art method. Especially for fidelity, our model has powerful image retention ability and result in high FVD in UCF101 compared to other image-to-video models. Also, precise control can be achieved by giving different text prompts. Further details and comprehensive results of our model will be presented in https://anonymous0769.github.io/DreamVideo/.

Concentrated Multi-Grained Multi-Attention Network for Video Based Person Re-Identification

Occlusion is still a severe problem in the video-based Re-IDentification (Re-ID) task, which has a great impact on the success rate. The attention mechanism has been proved to be helpful in solving the occlusion problem by a large number of existing methods. However, their attention mechanisms still lack the capability to extract sufficient discriminative information into the final representations from the videos. The single attention module scheme employed by existing methods cannot exploit multi-scale spatial cues, and the attention of the single module will be dispersed by multiple salient parts of the person. In this paper, we propose a Concentrated Multi-grained Multi-Attention Network (CMMANet) where two multi-attention modules are designed to extract multi-grained information through processing multi-scale intermediate features. Furthermore, multiple attention submodules in each multi-attention module can automatically discover multiple discriminative regions of the video frames. To achieve this goal, we introduce a diversity loss to diversify the submodules in each multi-attention module, and a concentration loss to integrate their attention responses so that each submodule can strongly focus on a specific meaningful part. The experimental results show that the proposed approach outperforms the state-of-the-art methods by large margins on multiple public datasets.

How Effectively Can Indoor Wireless Positioning Relieve Visual Tracking Pains: A Camera-Rao Bound Viewpoint

Visual tracking is fragile in some difficult scenarios, for instance, appearance ambiguity and variation, occlusion can easily degrade most of visual trackers to some extent. In this paper, visual tracking is empowered with wireless positioning to achieve high accuracy while maintaining robustness. Fundamentally different from the previous works, this study does not involve any specific wireless positioning algorithms. Instead, we use the confidence region derived from the wireless positioning Cramer-Rao bound (CRB) as the search region of visual trackers. The proposed framework is low-cost and very simple to implement, yet readily leads to enhanced and robustified visual tracking performance in difficult scenarios as corroborated by our experimental results. Most importantly, it is utmost valuable for the practioners to pre-evaluate how effectively can the wireless resources available at hand alleviate the visual tracking pains.