Video Co-summarization: Video Summarization by Visual Co-occurrence

We present video co-summarization, a novel perspective to video summarization that exploits visual co-occurrence across multiple videos. Motivated by the observation that important visual concepts tend to appear repeatedly across videos of the same topic, we propose to summarize a video by finding shots that co-occur most frequently across videos collected using a topic keyword. The main technical challenge is dealing with the sparsity of co-occurring patterns, out of hundreds to possibly thousands of irrelevant shots in videos being considered. To deal with this challenge, we developed a Maximal Biclique Finding (MBE) algorithm that is optimized to find sparsely co-occurring patterns, discarding less co-occurring patterns even if they are dominant in one video. Our algorithm is parallelizable with closed-form updates, thus can easily scale up to handle a large number of videos simultaneously. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach on motion capture and self-compiled YouTube datasets. Our results suggest that summaries generated by visual co-occurrence tend to match more closely with human generated summaries, when compared to several popular unsupervised techniques.