Papers › IcoCap: Improving Video Captioning by Compounding Images

IcoCap: Improving Video Captioning by Compounding Images

5 Oct 2023IEEE Transactions on Multimedia 2023 10archive 2025-07-28

Yuanzhi Liang, Linchao Zhu, Xiaohan Wang, Yi Yang

Video captioning is a more challenging task compared to image captioning, primarily due to differences in content density. Video data contains redundant visual content, making it difficult for captioners to generalize diverse content and avoid being misled by irrelevant elements. Moreover, redundant content is not well-trimmed to match the corresponding visual semantics in the ground truth, further increasing the difficulty of video captioning. Current research in video captioning predominantly focuses on captioner design, neglecting the impact of content density on captioner performance. Considering the differences between videos and images, there exists another line to improve video captioning by leveraging concise and easily-learned image samples to further diversify video samples. This modification to content density compels the captioner to learn more effectively against redundancy and ambiguity. In this paper, we propose a novel approach called Image-Compounded learning for video Captioners (IcoCap) to facilitate better learning of complex video semantics. IcoCap comprises two components: the Image-Video Compounding Strategy (ICS) and Visual-Semantic Guided Captioning (VGC). ICS compounds easily-learned image semantics into video semantics, further diversifying video content and prompting the network to generalize contents in a more diverse sample. Besides, learning with the sample compounded with image contents, the captioner is compelled to better extract valuable video cues in the presence of straightforward image semantics. This helps the captioner further focus on relevant information while filtering out extraneous content. Then, VGC guides the network in flexibly learning ground truth captions based on the compounded samples, helping to mitigate the mismatch between the ground truth and ambiguous semantics in video samples. Our experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of IcoCap in improving the learning of video captioners. Applied to the widely-used MSVD, MSR-VTT, and VATEX datasets, our approach achieves competitive or superior results compared to state-of-the-art methods, illustrating its capacity to handle redundant and ambiguous video data.

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Tasks

Image CaptioningVideo Captioning

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

TaskDatasetModelMetricValueRank at snapshotLeaderboardReport
Video Captioning MSR-VTT IcoCap (ViT-B/16) BLEU-4 47.0 #14 of 24 Archive leaderboard report
Video Captioning MSR-VTT IcoCap (ViT-B/16) CIDEr 60.2 #14 of 24 Archive leaderboard report
Video Captioning MSR-VTT IcoCap (ViT-B/16) METEOR 31.1 #14 of 24 Archive leaderboard report
Video Captioning MSR-VTT IcoCap (ViT-B/16) ROUGE-L 64.9 #14 of 24 Archive leaderboard report
Video Captioning MSR-VTT IcoCap (ViT-B/32) BLEU-4 46.1 #16 of 24 Archive leaderboard report
Video Captioning MSR-VTT IcoCap (ViT-B/32) CIDEr 59.1 #16 of 24 Archive leaderboard report
Video Captioning MSR-VTT IcoCap (ViT-B/32) METEOR 30.3 #16 of 24 Archive leaderboard report
Video Captioning MSR-VTT IcoCap (ViT-B/32) ROUGE-L 64.3 #16 of 24 Archive leaderboard report
Video Captioning MSVD IcoCap (ViT-B/16) BLEU-4 59.1 #13 of 16 Archive leaderboard report
Video Captioning MSVD IcoCap (ViT-B/16) CIDEr 110.3 #13 of 16 Archive leaderboard report
Video Captioning MSVD IcoCap (ViT-B/16) METEOR 39.5 #13 of 16 Archive leaderboard report
Video Captioning MSVD IcoCap (ViT-B/16) ROUGE-L 76.5 #13 of 16 Archive leaderboard report
Video Captioning MSVD IcoCap (ViT-B/32) BLEU-4 56.3 #16 of 16 Archive leaderboard report
Video Captioning MSVD IcoCap (ViT-B/32) CIDEr 103.8 #16 of 16 Archive leaderboard report
Video Captioning MSVD IcoCap (ViT-B/32) METEOR 38.9 #16 of 16 Archive leaderboard report
Video Captioning MSVD IcoCap (ViT-B/32) ROUGE-L 75.0 #16 of 16 Archive leaderboard report
Video Captioning VATEX IcoCap (ViT-B/16) BLEU-4 37.4 #5 of 10 Archive leaderboard report
Video Captioning VATEX IcoCap (ViT-B/16) CIDEr 67.8 #5 of 10 Archive leaderboard report
Video Captioning VATEX IcoCap (ViT-B/16) METEOR 25.7 #5 of 10 Archive leaderboard report
Video Captioning VATEX IcoCap (ViT-B/16) ROUGE-L 53.1 #5 of 10 Archive leaderboard report
Video Captioning VATEX IcoCap (ViT-B/32) BLEU-4 36.9 #6 of 10 Archive leaderboard report
Video Captioning VATEX IcoCap (ViT-B/32) CIDEr 63.4 #6 of 10 Archive leaderboard report
Video Captioning VATEX IcoCap (ViT-B/32) METEOR 24.6 #6 of 10 Archive leaderboard report
Video Captioning VATEX IcoCap (ViT-B/32) ROUGE-L 52.5 #6 of 10 Archive leaderboard report

Ranks are positions in the archive's leaderboards as they stood at the 2025-07-28 snapshot. Results published since then are not among these rows, so a rank here is not a current standing.

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