Contrastive Learning for Unsupervised Video Highlight Detection

Video highlight detection can greatly simplify video browsing, potentially paving the way for a wide range of ap-plications. Existing efforts are mostly fully-supervised, requiring humans to manually identify and label the interesting moments (called highlights) in a video. Recent weakly supervised methods forgo the use of highlight annotations, but typically require extensive efforts in collecting external data such as web-crawled videos for model learning. This observation has inspired us to consider unsupervised highlight detection where neither frame-level nor video-level annotations are available in training. We propose a simple contrastive learning framework for unsupervised highlight detection. Our framework encodes a video into a vector representation by learning to pick video clips that help to distinguish it from other videos via a contrastive objective using dropout noise. This inherently allows our framework to identify video clips corresponding to highlight of the video. Extensive empirical evaluations on three highlight detection benchmarks demonstrate the superior performance of our approach.