Towards Data-Driven Automatic Video Editing

Automatic video editing involving at least the steps of selecting the most valuable footage from points of view of visual quality and the importance of action filmed; and cutting the footage into a brief and coherent visual story that would be interesting to watch is implemented in a purely data-driven manner. Visual semantic and aesthetic features are extracted by the ImageNet-trained convolutional neural network, and the editing controller is trained by an imitation learning algorithm. As a result, at test time the controller shows the signs of observing basic cinematography editing rules learned from the corpus of motion pictures masterpieces.