Multichannel Attention Refinement for Video Question Answering

Abstract

Video Question Answering (VideoQA) is the extension of image question answering (ImageQA) in the video domain. Methods are required to give the correct answer after analyzing the provided video and question in this task. Comparing to ImageQA, the most distinctive part is the media type. Both tasks require the understanding of visual media, but VideoQA is much more challenging, mainly because of the complexity and diversity of videos. Particularly, working with the video needs to model its inherent temporal structure and analyze the diverse information it contains. In this article, we propose to tackle the task from a multichannel perspective. Appearance, motion, and audio features are extracted from the video, and question-guided attentions are refined to generate the expressive clues that support the correct answer. We also incorporate the relevant text information acquired from Wikipedia as an attempt to extend the capability of the method. Experiments on TGIF-QA and ActivityNet-QA datasets show the advantages of our method compared to existing methods. We also demonstrate the effectiveness and interpretability of our method by analyzing the refined attention weights during the question-answering procedure.