Connectionists: Workshop on Describing and Understanding Video and The Large Scale Movie Description Challenge (LSMDC)

[Hugo Larochelle]

We would like to invite you to participate in the workshop on Describing and Understanding Video, which will be organized in conjunction with ICCV 2015, Santiago, Chile, as well as to take part in our Large Scale Movie Description Challenge (LSMDC).

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Call for papers and challenge participation

Automatically describing open-domain videos using rich natural sentences is among the most challenging tasks of computer vision, natural language processing and machine learning. To stimulate research on this topic, we propose the Describing and Understanding Videos Workshop & LSMDC Challenge, which features a unified version of the recently published large-scale movie datasets (M-VAD and MPII-MD). These datasets have been built using Audio Descriptions (AD) / Descriptive Video Service (DVS) resources for the visually impaired, which are transcribed and aligned to the video.

The goal of this workshop is thus to bring together researchers working on diverse topics in computer vision and natural language processing in order to obtain a better understanding of the existing challenges and new research directions of open-domain video description with natural sentences.

We invite submissions on topics pertaining to the subject, including:
	• Generating descriptions for videos.
	• Generating Audio Descriptions for movies.
	• Using textual descriptions as weak supervision for video understanding.
	• Using dialogs and/or audio for video understanding.
	• Understanding plots.
	• Recognizing characters in TV series / movies.
	• Novel tasks with Audio Descriptions / DVS dataset.

LSMDC Challenge

A unified challenge based on the M-VAD and MPII-MD datasets is put in place. We will provide a blind test set (i.e. without descriptions). Winners will be selected based on a human evaluation of submissions to the challenge. Additional automatic evaluation scripts will be made available for development. We host two challenges: 
	• Text generation using single video clip.
	• Text generation using single video clip as well as its surrounding context (i.e. video clips, ground truth descriptions, character names, dialogues).

Important Dates

Paper submission early deadline: October 1st
Paper submission final deadline: November 16th
Notification of paper acceptance: within 2 weeks after each deadline

Challenge submission opens: September 16th
Challenge submission deadline: November 16th

Workshop: half day, on one of these days: 11, 12, 17 or 18th of December 

Contact: lsmdc2015 at gmail.com
Website: https://sites.google.com/site/describingmovies


Best,

Organizers

Anna Rohrbach​
Max Planck Institute for Informatics

Atousa Torabi​
Université de Montréal

Marcus Rohrbach
ICSI and UC Berkeley

Christopher Pal
École Polytechnique de Montréal

Hugo Larochelle
Université de Sherbrooke

Aaron Courville​
Université de Montréal

Bernt Schiele​
Max Planck Institute for Informatics