  Generating descriptions for videos has many applications including assisting
blind people and human-robot interaction. The recent advances in image
captioning as well as the release of large-scale movie description datasets
such as MPII Movie Description allow to study this task in more depth. Many of
the proposed methods for image captioning rely on pre-trained object classifier
CNNs and Long-Short Term Memory recurrent networks (LSTMs) for generating
descriptions. While image description focuses on objects, we argue that it is
important to distinguish verbs, objects, and places in the challenging setting
of movie description. In this work we show how to learn robust visual
classifiers from the weak annotations of the sentence descriptions. Based on
these visual classifiers we learn how to generate a description using an LSTM.
We explore different design choices to build and train the LSTM and achieve the
best performance to date on the challenging MPII-MD dataset. We compare and
analyze our approach and prior work along various dimensions to better
understand the key challenges of the movie description task.
