OVC-Net: Object-Oriented Video Captioning with Temporal Graph and Detail Enhancement

Traditional video captioning requests a holistic description of the video, yet the detailed descriptions of the specific objects may not be available. Without associating the moving trajectories, these image-based data-driven methods cannot understand the activities from the spatio-temporal transitions in the inter-object visual features. Besides, adopting ambiguous clip-sentence pairs in training, it goes against learning the multi-modal functional mappings owing to the one-to-many nature. In this paper, we propose a novel task to understand the videos in object-level, named object-oriented video captioning. We introduce the video-based object-oriented video captioning network (OVC)-Net via temporal graph and detail enhancement to effectively analyze the activities along time and stably capture the vision-language connections under small-sample condition. The temporal graph provides useful supplement over previous image-based approaches, allowing to reason the activities from the temporal evolution of visual features and the dynamic movement of spatial locations. The detail enhancement helps to capture the discriminative features among different objects, with which the subsequent captioning module can yield more informative and precise descriptions. Thereafter, we construct a new dataset, providing consistent object-sentence pairs, to facilitate effective cross-modal learning. To demonstrate the effectiveness, we conduct experiments on the new dataset and compare it with the state-of-the-art video captioning methods. From the experimental results, the OVC-Net exhibits the ability of precisely describing the concurrent objects, and achieves the state-of-the-art performance.