Video Paragraph Captioning as a Text Summarization Task

Abstract

Video paragraph captioning aims to generate a set of coherent sentences to describe a video that contains several events. Most previous methods simplify this task by using groundtruth event segments. In this work, we propose a novel framework by taking this task as a text summarization task. We first generate lots of sentence-level captions focusing on different video clips and then summarize these captions to obtain the final paragraph caption. Our method does not depend on ground-truth event segments. Experiments on two popular datasets ActivityNet Captions and YouCookII demonstrate the advantages of our new framework. On the ActivityNet dataset, our method even outperforms some previous methods using ground-truth event segment labels.