DeepQAMVS: Query-Aware Hierarchical Pointer Networks for Multi-Video Summarization

Abstract

The recent growth of web video sharing platforms has increased the demand for systems that can efficiently browse, retrieve and summarize video content. Query-aware multi-video summarization is a promising technique that caters to this demand. In this work, we introduce a novel Query-Aware Hierarchical Pointer Network for Multi-Video Summarization, termed DeepQAMVS, that jointly optimizes multiple criteria: (1) conciseness, (2) representativeness of important query-relevant events and (3) chronological soundness. We design a hierarchical attention model that factorizes over three distributions, each collecting evidence from a different modality, followed by a pointer network that selects frames to include in the summary. DeepQAMVS is trained with reinforcement learning, incorporating rewards that capture representativeness, diversity, query-adaptability and temporal coherence. We achieve state-of-the-art results on the MVS1K dataset, with inference time scaling linearly with the number of input video frames.

Safa Messaoud, Ismini Lourentzou, Assma Boughoula, Mona Zehni, Zhizhen Zhao, Chengxiang Zhai, Alexander G. Schwing: DeepQAMVS: Query-Aware Hierarchical Pointer Networks for Multi-Video Summarization. SIGIR 2021: 1389-1399