Interactions between people are often governed by their relationships. On the flip side, social relationships are built upon several interactions. Two strangers are more likely to greet and introduce themselves while becoming friends over time. We are fascinated by this interplay between interactions and relationships, and believe that it is an important aspect of understanding social situations. In this work, we propose neural models to learn and jointly predict interactions, relationships, and the pair of characters that are involved. We note that interactions are informed by a mixture of visual and dialog cues, and present a multimodal architecture to extract meaningful information from them. Localizing the pair of interacting characters in video is a time-consuming process, instead, we train our model to learn from clip-level weak labels. We evaluate our models on the MovieGraphs dataset and show the impact of modalities, use of longer temporal context for predicting relationships, and achieve encouraging performance using weak labels as compared with ground-truth labels. Code is online.
In the process of making a movie, directors constantly care about where the spectator will look on the screen. Shot composition, framing, camera movements or editing are tools commonly used to direct attention. In order to provide a quantitative analysis of the relationship between those tools and gaze patterns, we propose a new eye-tracking database, containing gaze pattern information on movie sequences, as well as editing annotations, and we show how state-of-the-art computational saliency techniques behave on this dataset. In this work, we expose strong links between movie editing and spec…
The Chinese University of Hong Kong（香港中文大学）；University of California, Berkeley（加州大学伯克利分校）
Inspired by the remarkable advances in video analytics, research teams are stepping towards a greater ambition -- movie understanding. However, compared to those activity videos in conventional datasets, movies are significantly different. Generally, movies are much longer and consist of much richer temporal structures. More importantly, the interactions among characters play a central role in expressing the underlying story. To facilitate the efforts along this direction, we construct a dataset called Movie Synopses Associations (MSA) over 327 movies, which provides a synopsis for each movie,…
Our objective in this work is long range understanding of the narrative structure of movies. Instead of considering the entire movie, we propose to learn from the `key scenes' of the movie, providing a condensed look at the full storyline. To this end, we make the following three contributions: (i) We create the Condensed Movies Dataset (CMD) consisting of the key scenes from over 3K movies: each key scene is accompanied by a high level semantic description of the scene, character face-tracks, and metadata about the movie. The dataset is scalable, obtained automatically from YouTube, and is fr…
National Institute of Standards and Technology（美国国家标准与技术研究院）；Georgetown University（乔治城大学）
In this paper we propose a new evaluation challenge and direction in the area of High-level Video Understanding. The challenge we are proposing is designed to test automatic video analysis and understanding, and how accurately systems can comprehend a movie in terms of actors, entities, events and their relationship to each other. A pilot High-Level Video Understanding (HLVU) dataset of open source movies were collected for human assessors to build a knowledge graph representing each of them. A set of queries will be derived from the knowledge graph to test systems on retrieving relationships …
Character-Centric Understanding of Animated Movies
Visual Geometry Group Dept.\ of Engineering Science University of Oxford, UK；School of Artifitial Intelligence\ Jiao Tong University Shanghai China；School of Artifitial Intelligence\ Jiao Tong University
Fonts have had trends throughout their history, not only in when they were invented but also in their usage and popularity. In this paper, we attempt to specifically find the trends in font usage using robust regression on a large collection of text images. We utilize movie posters as the source of fonts for this task because movie posters can represent time periods by using their release date. In addition, movie posters are documents that are carefully designed and represent a wide range of fonts. To understand the relationship between the fonts of movie posters and time, we use a regression …
Carnegie Mellon University（卡内基梅隆大学）；University of Warwick（华威大学）
An effective approach to automated movie content analysis involves building a network (graph) of its characters. Existing work usually builds a static character graph to summarize the content using metadata, scripts or manual annotations. We propose an unsupervised approach to building a dynamic character graph that captures the temporal evolution of character interaction. We refer to this as the character interaction graph(CIG). Our approach has two components:(i) an online face clustering algorithm that discovers the characters in the video stream as they appear, and (ii) simultaneous creati…
An essential goal of computational media intelligence is to support understanding how media stories -- be it news, commercial or entertainment media -- represent and reflect society and these portrayals are perceived. People are a central element of media stories. This paper focuses on understanding the representation and depiction of background characters in media depictions, primarily movies and TV shows. We define the background characters as those who do not participate vocally in any scene throughout the movie and address the problem of localizing background characters in videos. We use a…
MovieTeller: Tool-augmented Movie Synopsis with ID Consistent Progressive Abstraction
Central Universities（中央高校）；National Natural Science Foundation of China（中国国家自然科学基金委员会）；Research Fund for International Scientists of National Natural Science Foundation of China（中国国家自然科学基金委员会国际科学家研究基金）
Is it possible to guess human action from dialogue alone? In this work we investigate the link between spoken words and actions in movies. We note that movie screenplays describe actions, as well as contain the speech of characters and hence can be used to learn this correlation with no additional supervision. We train a BERT-based Speech2Action classifier on over a thousand movie screenplays, to predict action labels from transcribed speech segments. We then apply this model to the speech segments of a large unlabelled movie corpus (188M speech segments from 288K movies). Using the prediction…
Robust face clustering is a vital step in enabling computational understanding of visual character portrayal in media. Face clustering for long-form content is challenging because of variations in appearance and lack of supporting large-scale labeled data. Our work in this paper focuses on two key aspects of this problem: the lack of domain-specific training or benchmark datasets, and adapting face embeddings learned on web images to long-form content, specifically movies. First, we present a dataset of over 169,000 face tracks curated from 240 Hollywood movies with weak labels on whether a pa…
Max Planck Institute for Informatics（马克斯·普朗克信息学研究所）；UC Berkeley（加州大学伯克利分校）；Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems（马克斯·普朗克智能系统研究所）
Learning how to generate descriptions of images or videos received major interest both in the Computer Vision and Natural Language Processing communities. While a few works have proposed to learn a grounding during the generation process in an unsupervised way (via an attention mechanism), it remains unclear how good the quality of the grounding is and whether it benefits the description quality. In this work we propose a movie description model which learns to generate description and jointly ground (localize) the mentioned characters as well as do visual co-reference resolution between pairs…
University of Modena and Reggio Emilia（摩德纳-雷焦艾米利亚大学）
Current movie captioning architectures are not capable of mentioning characters with their proper name, replacing them with a generic "someone" tag. The lack of movie description datasets with characters' visual annotations surely plays a relevant role in this shortage. Recently, we proposed to extend the M-VAD dataset by introducing such information. In this paper, we present an improved version of the dataset, namely M-VAD Names, and its semi-automatic annotation procedure. The resulting dataset contains 63k visual tracks and 34k textual mentions, all associated with character identities. To…
Movie Facts and Fibs (MF$^2$): A Benchmark for Long Movie Understanding
Instituto Superior Técnico, Universidade de Lisboa（里斯本大学高等理工学院）；Instituto de Telecomunicações（电信研究所）；University of Amsterdam（阿姆斯特丹大学）；Institut de Robòtica i Informàtica Industrial, CSIC-UPC（加泰罗尼亚理工大学-西班牙国家研究委员会工业机器人与计算机研究所）；UNC Chapel Hill（北卡罗来纳大学教堂山分校）；University of Copenhagen（哥本哈根大学）；Pioneer Center for AI（人工智能先锋中心）；Heriot-Watt University（赫瑞瓦特大学）；Free University of Bozen-Bolzano（博尔扎诺自由大学）；Unbabel（Unbabel公司）；ELLIS Unit Amsterdam（阿姆斯特丹ELLIS单元）；ELLIS Unit Lisbon（里斯本ELLIS单元）；ELLIS Unit Trento（特伦托ELLIS单元）；ELLIS Unit Barcelona（巴塞罗那ELLIS单元）
