Dense Video Captioning: A Survey of Techniques, Datasets and Evaluation Protocols
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Abstract (arXiv)
Untrimmed videos have interrelated events, dependencies, context, overlapping events, object-object interactions, domain specificity, and other semantics that are worth highlighting while describing a video in natural language. Owing to such a vast diversity, a single sentence can only correctly describe a portion of the video. Dense Video Captioning (DVC) aims at detecting and describing different events in a given video. The term DVC originated in the 2017 ActivityNet challenge, after which considerable effort has been made to address the challenge. Dense Video Captioning is divided into three sub-tasks: (1) Video Feature Extraction (VFE), (2) Temporal Event Localization (TEL), and (3) Dense Caption Generation (DCG). This review aims to discuss all the studies that claim to perform DVC along with its sub-tasks and summarize their results. We also discuss all the datasets that have been used for DVC. Lastly, we highlight some emerging challenges and future trends in the field.
Key facts. Cited by 17 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026). Builds on 70 of its 154 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 5 Nov 2023.
Builds on
70 of 154 references.
References · 70
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Citing papers per year: 2024: 2; 2025: 9; 2026: 6.
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- 2025StreamKV: Streaming Video Question-Answering with Segment-based KV Cache Retrieval and Compressioncited by 26
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- 2025VDC-Agent: When Video Detailed Captioners Evolve Themselves via Agentic Self-Reflectioncited by 6
- 2024Audio Description Generation in the Era of LLMs and VLMs: A Review of Transferable Generative AI Technologiescited by 5
- 2026Open-Ended Video Game Glitch Detection with Agentic Reasoning and Temporal Groundingcited by 3
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- 2024Fine-grained length controllable video captioning with ordinal embeddingscited by 2
- 2025Enhancing Surgical Documentation through Multimodal Visual-Temporal Transformers and Generative AIcited by 2
- 2026ViSIL: Unified Evaluation of Information Loss in Multimodal Video Captioningcited by 2
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- 2026Temporal and Cross-Modal Alignment for Enhanced Audiovisual Video Captioning2 Jul 2026
- 2026Open-Ended Video Game Glitch Detection with Agentic Reasoning and Temporal Grounding9 Apr 2026
- 2026SAVA-X: Ego-to-Exo Imitation Error Detection via Scene-Adaptive View Alignment and Bidirectional Cross View Fusion13 Mar 2026
- 2026ReMoRa: Multimodal Large Language Model based on Refined Motion Representation for Long-Video Understanding18 Feb 2026
- 2026LFS: Learnable Frame Selector for Event-Aware and Temporally Diverse Video Captioning21 Jan 2026
- 2026ViSIL: Unified Evaluation of Information Loss in Multimodal Video Captioning14 Jan 2026
- 2025VDC-Agent: When Video Detailed Captioners Evolve Themselves via Agentic Self-Reflection24 Nov 2025
- 2025StreamKV: Streaming Video Question-Answering with Segment-based KV Cache Retrieval and Compression10 Nov 2025
- 2025Visual Lifelog Retrieval through Captioning-Enhanced Interpretation5 Oct 2025
- 2025Toward Scalable Video Narration: A Training-free Approach Using Multimodal Large Language Models22 Jul 2025
- 2025ARGUS: Hallucination and Omission Evaluation in Video-LLMs9 Jun 2025
- 2025Time Blindness: Why Video-Language Models Can't See What Humans Can?30 May 2025
5 more
- 2025Temporal-Oriented Recipe for Transferring Large Vision-Language Model to Video Understanding19 May 2025
- 2025Enhancing Surgical Documentation through Multimodal Visual-Temporal Transformers and Generative AI28 Apr 2025
- 2025EventVL: Understand Event Streams via Multimodal Large Language Model23 Jan 2025
- 2024Audio Description Generation in the Era of LLMs and VLMs: A Review of Transferable Generative AI Technologies11 Oct 2024
- 2024Fine-grained length controllable video captioning with ordinal embeddings27 Aug 2024
- 2025Time Blindness: Why Video-Language Models Can't See What Humans Can?cited by 18
- 2025EventVL: Understand Event Streams via Multimodal Large Language Modelcited by 13
- 2026ReMoRa: Multimodal Large Language Model based on Refined Motion Representation for Long-Video Understandingcited by 8
- 2026Temporal and Cross-Modal Alignment for Enhanced Audiovisual Video Captioningcited by 3
- 2025Temporal-Oriented Recipe for Transferring Large Vision-Language Model to Video Understandingcited by 1
- 2025Toward Scalable Video Narration: A Training-free Approach Using Multimodal Large Language Modelscited by 0
- 2026Temporal and Cross-Modal Alignment for Enhanced Audiovisual Video Captioning2 Jul 2026
- 2026ReMoRa: Multimodal Large Language Model based on Refined Motion Representation for Long-Video Understanding18 Feb 2026
- 2025Toward Scalable Video Narration: A Training-free Approach Using Multimodal Large Language Models22 Jul 2025
- 2025Time Blindness: Why Video-Language Models Can't See What Humans Can?30 May 2025
- 2025Temporal-Oriented Recipe for Transferring Large Vision-Language Model to Video Understanding19 May 2025
- 2025EventVL: Understand Event Streams via Multimodal Large Language Model23 Jan 2025
- 2025ARGUS: Hallucination and Omission Evaluation in Video-LLMscited by 16
- 2024Audio Description Generation in the Era of LLMs and VLMs: A Review of Transferable Generative AI Technologiescited by 5
- 2024Fine-grained length controllable video captioning with ordinal embeddingscited by 2
- 2025Enhancing Surgical Documentation through Multimodal Visual-Temporal Transformers and Generative AIcited by 2
- 2026ViSIL: Unified Evaluation of Information Loss in Multimodal Video Captioningcited by 2
- 2025Visual Lifelog Retrieval through Captioning-Enhanced Interpretationcited by 1
- 2026LFS: Learnable Frame Selector for Event-Aware and Temporally Diverse Video Captioningcited by 1
- 2026SAVA-X: Ego-to-Exo Imitation Error Detection via Scene-Adaptive View Alignment and Bidirectional Cross View Fusioncited by 0
- 2026SAVA-X: Ego-to-Exo Imitation Error Detection via Scene-Adaptive View Alignment and Bidirectional Cross View Fusion13 Mar 2026
- 2026LFS: Learnable Frame Selector for Event-Aware and Temporally Diverse Video Captioning21 Jan 2026
- 2026ViSIL: Unified Evaluation of Information Loss in Multimodal Video Captioning14 Jan 2026
- 2025Visual Lifelog Retrieval through Captioning-Enhanced Interpretation5 Oct 2025
- 2025ARGUS: Hallucination and Omission Evaluation in Video-LLMs9 Jun 2025
- 2025Enhancing Surgical Documentation through Multimodal Visual-Temporal Transformers and Generative AI28 Apr 2025
- 2024Audio Description Generation in the Era of LLMs and VLMs: A Review of Transferable Generative AI Technologies11 Oct 2024
- 2024Fine-grained length controllable video captioning with ordinal embeddings27 Aug 2024