Deep Reinforcement Learning for Query-Conditioned Video Summarization

Query-conditioned video summarization requires to (1) find a diverse set of video shots/frames that are representative for the whole video, and that (2) the selected shots/frames are related to a given query. Thus it can be tailored to different user interests leading to a better personalized summary and differs from the generic video summarization which only focuses on video content. Our work targets this query-conditioned video summarization task, by first proposing a Mapping Network (MapNet) in order to express how related a shot is to a given query. MapNet helps establish the relation between the two different modalities (videos and query), which allows mapping of visual information to query space. After that, a deep reinforcement learning-based summarization network (SummNet) is developed to provide personalized summaries by integrating relatedness, representativeness and diversity rewards. These rewards jointly guide the agent to select the most representative and diversity video shots that are most related to the user query. Experimental results on a query-conditioned video summarization benchmark demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method, indicating the usefulness of the proposed mapping mechanism as well as the reinforcement learning approach.