Reconstruction Network for Video Captioning

Bairui Wang, Lin Ma, Wei Zhang, Wei Liu; Proceedings of the IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2018, pp. 7622-7631

In this paper, the problem of describing visual contents of a video sequence with natural language is addressed. Unlike previous video captioning work mainly exploiting the cues of video contents to make a language description, we propose a reconstruction network (RecNet) with a novel encoder-decoder-reconstructor architecture, which leverages both the forward (video to sentence) and backward (sentence to video) flows for video captioning. Specifically, the encoder-decoder makes use of the forward flow to produce the sentence description based on the encoded video semantic features. Two types of reconstructors are customized to employ the backward flow and reproduce the video features based on the hidden state sequence generated by the decoder. The generation loss yielded by encoder-decoder and the reconstruction loss introduced by reconstructor are jointly drawn into training the proposed RecNet in an end-to-end fashion. Experimental results on benchmark datasets demonstrate that the proposed reconstructor could boost the encoder-decoder models and leads to significant gains on video caption accuracy.