Video summarization with temporal-channel visual transformer

Video summarization task has gained widespread interest, benefiting from its valuable capabilities for efficient video browsing. Existing approaches generally focus on inter-frame temporal correlations, which may not be sufficient to identify crucial content because of the limited useful details that can be gleaned. To resolve these issues, we propose a novel transformer-based approach for video summarization, called Temporal-Channel Visual Transformer (TCVT). The proposed TCVT consists of three components, including a dual-stream embedding module, an inter-frame encoder, and an intra-segment encoder. The dual-stream embedding module creates the fusion embedding sequence by extracting visual features and short-range optical features, preserving appearance and motion details. The temporal-channel inter-frame correlations are learned by the inter-frame encoder with multiple temporal and channel attention modules. Meanwhile, the intra-segment representations are captured by the intra-segment encoder for the local temporal context modeling. Finally, we fuse the frame-level and segment-level representations for the frame-wise importance score prediction. Our network outperforms state-of-the-art methods on two benchmark datasets, with improvements from 55.3% to 56.9% on the SumMe dataset and from 69.3% to 70.4% on the TVSum dataset.