A Graph-Based Framework to Bridge Movies and Synopses
Yu Xiong Qingqiu Huang Lingfeng Guo Hang Zhou Bolei Zhou Dahua Lin
International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV) 2019, Seoul, Korea

Abstract

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, together with annotated associations between synopsis paragraphs and movie segments. On top of this dataset, we develop a framework to perform matching between movie segments and synopsis paragraphs. This framework integrates different aspects of a movie, including event dynamics and character interactions, and allows them to be matched with parsed paragraphs, based on a graph-based formulation. Our study shows that the proposed framework remarkably improves the matching accuracy over conventional feature-based methods. It also reveals the importance of narrative structures and character interactions in movie understanding.

Dataset

We proposed a new dataset called Movie Synopsis Association for cross modality understanding.

The associations between movie segments and synopsis paragraphs are provided. These annotations can facilitate tasks such as video retrieval, caption generation, etc.



Splits Train Val Test Total
# Movies 249 28 50 327
# Segments 3329 341 824 4494
# Shots / seg. 96.4 89.8 76.9 92.3
Duration / seg. 427.4 469.6 332.8 413.3
# Sents. / para. 6.0 6.0 5.5 5.9
# Words. / para. 130.8 132.5 120.5 129.0


Materials

Citation

@InProceedings{Xiong_2019_ICCV,
    author = {Xiong, Yu and Huang, Qingqiu and Guo, Lingfeng and Zhou, Hang and Zhou, Bolei and Lin, Dahua},
    title = {A Graph-Based Framework to Bridge Movies and Synopses},
    booktitle = {The IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV)},
    month = {October},
    year = {2019}
}

Contact

Yu Xiong: xy017[AT]ie.cuhk.edu.hk