Scenario-Aware Recurrent Transformer for Goal-Directed Video Captioning

Fully mining visual cues to aid in content understanding is crucial for video captioning. However, most state-of-the-art video captioning methods are limited to generating captions purely based on straightforward information while ignoring the scenario and context information. To fill the gap, we propose a novel, simple but effective scenario-aware recurrent transformer (SART) model to execute video captioning. Our model contains a “scenario understanding” module to obtain a global perspective across multiple frames, providing a specific scenario to guarantee a goal-directed description. Moreover, for the sake of achieving narrative continuity in the generated paragraph, a unified recurrent transformer is adopted. To demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed SART, we have conducted comprehensive experiments on various large-scale video description datasets, including ActivityNet, YouCookII, and VideoStory. Additionally, we extend a story-oriented evaluation framework for assessing the quality of the generated caption more precisely. The superior performance has shown that SART has a strong ability to generate correct, deliberative, and narrative coherent video descriptions.