Summarization of Videos with the Signature Transform

This manuscript presents a new benchmark for assessing the quality of visual summaries without the need for human annotators. It is based on the Signature Transform, specifically focusing on the RMSE and the MAE Signature and Log-Signature metrics, and builds upon the assumption that uniform random sampling can offer accurate summarization capabilities. We provide a new dataset comprising videos from Youtube and their corresponding automatic audio transcriptions. Firstly, we introduce a preliminary baseline for automatic video summarization, which has at its core a Vision Transformer, an image–text model pre-trained with Contrastive Language–Image Pre-training (CLIP), as well as a module of object detection. Following that, we propose an accurate technique grounded in the harmonic components captured by the Signature Transform, which delivers compelling accuracy. The analytical measures are extensively evaluated, and we conclude that they strongly correlate with the notion of a good summary.