AutoAD III: The Prequel - Back to the Pixels

Generating Audio Description (AD) for movies is a challenging task that requires fine-grained visual understanding and an awareness of the characters and their names. Currently visual language models for AD generation are limited by a lack of suitable training data and also their evaluation is hampered by using performance measures not specialized to the AD domain. In this paper we make three contributions: (i) We propose two approaches for constructing AD datasets with aligned video data and build training and evaluation datasets using these. These datasets will be publicly released; (ii) We develop a Q-former-based architecture which ingests raw video and generates AD using frozen pre-trained visual encoders and large language models; and (iii) We provide new evaluation metrics to benchmark AD quality that are well matched to human performance. Taken together we improve the state of the art on AD generation.