Enhancing video summarization via vision-language embedding

This paper addresses video summarization, or the problem of distilling a raw video into a shorter form while still capturing the original story. We show that visual representations supervised by freeform language make a good fit for this application by extending a recent submodular summarization approach [9] with representativeness and interestingness objectives computed on features from a joint vision-language embedding space. We perform an evaluation on two diverse datasets, UT Egocentric [18] and TV Episodes [45], and show that our new objectives give improved summarization ability compared to standard visual features alone. Our experiments also show that the vision-language embedding need not be trained on domain-specific data, but can be learned from standard still image vision-language datasets and transferred to video. A further benefit of our model is the ability to guide a summary using freeform text input at test time, allowing user customization.