Character Grounding and Re-Identification in Story of Videos and Text Descriptions

Abstract

We address character grounding and re-identification in multiple story-based videos like movies and associated text descriptions. In order to solve these related tasks in a mutually rewarding way, we propose a model named Character in Story Identification Network (CiSIN). Our method builds two semantically informative representations via joint training of multiple objectives for character grounding, video/text re-identification and gender prediction: Visual Track Embedding from videos and Textual Character Embedding from text context. These two representations are learned to retain rich semantic multimodal information that enables even simple MLPs to achieve the state-of-the-art performance on the target tasks. More specifically, our CiSIN model achieves the best performance in the Fill-in the Characters task of LSMDC 2019 challenges. Moreover, it outperforms previous state-of-the-art models in M-VAD Names dataset as a benchmark of multimodal character grounding and re-identification.