Video summarization with a graph convolutional attention network

Abstract

Video summarization has established itself as a fundamental technique for generating compact and concise video, which alleviates managing and browsing large-scale video data. Existing methods fail to fully consider the local and global relations among frames of video, leading to a deteriorated summarization performance. To address the above problem, we propose a graph convolutional attention network (GCAN) for video summarization. GCAN consists of two parts, embedding learning and context fusion, where embedding learning includes the temporal branch and graph branch. In particular, GCAN uses dilated temporal convolution to model local cues and temporal self-attention to exploit global cues for video frames. It learns graph embedding via a multi-layer graph convolutional network to reveal the intrinsic structure of frame samples. The context fusion part combines the output streams from the temporal branch and graph branch to create the context-aware representation of frames, on which the importance scores are evaluated for selecting representative frames to generate video summary. Experiments are carried out on two benchmark databases, SumMe and TVSum, showing that the proposed GCAN approach enjoys superior performance compared to several state-of-the-art alternatives in three evaluation settings.