CSTA: CNN-based Spatiotemporal Attention for Video Summarization

Video summarization aims to generate a concise repre-sentation of a video, capturing its essential content and key moments while reducing its overall length. Although several methods employ attention mechanisms to handle long-term dependencies, they often fail to capture the visual signif-icance inherent in frames. To address this limitation, we propose a CNN-based SpatioTemporal Attention (CSTA) method that stacks each feature of frames from a single video to form image-like frame representations and applies 2D CNN to these frame features. Our methodology relies on CNN to comprehend the inter and intra-frame relations and to find crucial attributes in videos by exploiting its abil-ity to learn absolute positions within images. In contrast to previous work compromising efficiency by designing additional modules to focus on spatial importance, CSTA re-quires minimal computational overhead as it uses CNN as a sliding window. Extensive experiments on two benchmark datasets (SumMe and TVSum) demonstrate that our pro-posed approach achieves state-of-the-art performance with fewer MACs compared to previous methods. Codes are available at https://github.com/thswodnjs3/CSTA.