TeViS: Translating Text Synopses to Video Storyboards

A video storyboard is a roadmap for video creation which consists of shot-by-shot images to visualize key plots in a text synopsis. Creating video storyboards, however, remains challenging which not only requires cross-modal association between high-level texts and images but also demands long-term reasoning to make transitions smooth across shots. In this paper, we propose a new task called Text synopsis to Video Storyboard (TeViS) which aims to retrieve an ordered sequence of images as the video storyboard to visualize the text synopsis. We construct a MovieNet-TeViS dataset based on the public MovieNet dataset [17]. It contains 10K text synopses each paired with keyframes manually selected from corresponding movies by considering both relevance and cinematic coherence. To benchmark the task, we present strong CLIP-based baselines and a novel VQ-Trans model. VQ-Trans first encodes text synopsis and images into a joint embedding space and uses vector quantization (VQ) to improve the visual representation. Then, it auto-regressively generates a sequence of visual features for retrieval and ordering. Experimental results demonstrate that VQ-Trans significantly outperforms prior methods and the CLIP-based baselines. Nevertheless, there is still a large gap compared to human performance suggesting room for promising future work. The code and data are available at: https://ruc-aimind.github.io/projects/TeViS/