The large amount of videos popping up every day, make it more and more critical that key information within videos can be extracted and understood in a very short time. Video summarization, the task of finding the smallest subset of frames, which still conveys the whole story of a given video, is thus of great significance to improve efficiency of video understanding. We propose a novel Dilated Temporal Relational Generative Adversarial Network (DTR-GAN) to achieve frame-level video summarization. Given a video, it selects the set of key frames, which contain the most meaningful and compact information. Specifically, DTR-GAN learns a dilated temporal relational generator and a discriminator with three-player loss in an adversarial manner. A new dilated temporal relation (DTR) unit is introduced to enhance temporal representation capturing. The generator uses this unit to effectively exploit global multi-scale temporal context to select key frames and to complement the commonly used Bi-LSTM. To ensure that summaries capture enough key video representation from a global perspective rather than a trivial randomly shorten sequence, we present a discriminator that learns to enforce both the information completeness and compactness of summaries via a three-player loss. The loss includes the generated summary loss, the random summary loss, and the real summary (ground-truth) loss, which play important roles for better regularizing the learned model to obtain useful summaries. Comprehensive experiments on three public datasets show the effectiveness of the proposed approach.
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