With the growing demand for solutions to real-world video challenges, interest in dense video captioning (DVC) has been on the rise. DVC involves the automatic captioning and localization of untrimmed videos. Several studies highlight the challenges of DVC and introduce improved methods utilizing prior knowledge such as pre-training and external memory. In this research, we propose a model that leverages the prior knowledge of human-oriented hierarchical dense memory inspired by human memory hierarchy and cognition. To mimic human-like memory recall, we construct a hierarchical memory and a hierarchical memory reading module. We build an efficient hierarchical dense memory by employing clustering of memory events and summarization using large language models. Comparative experiments demonstrate that this hierarchical memory recall process improves the performance of DVC by achieving state-of-the-art performance on YouCook2 and ViTT datasets.

There has been significant attention to the research on dense video captioning, which aims to automatically localize and caption all events within untrimmed video. Several studies introduce methods by designing dense video captioning as a multitasking problem of event localization and event captioning to consider inter-task relations. However, addressing both tasks using only visual input is challenging due to the lack of semantic content. In this study, we address this by proposing a novel framework inspired by the cognitive information processing of humans. Our model utilizes external memory to incorporate prior knowledge. The memory retrieval method is proposed with cross-modal video-to-text matching. To effectively incorporate retrieved text features, the versatile encoder and the decoder with visual and textual cross-attention modules are designed. Comparative experiments have been conducted to show the effectiveness of the proposed method on ActivityNet Captions and YouCook2 datasets. Experimental results show promising performance of our model without extensive pretraining from a large video dataset. Our code is available at https://github.com/ailab-kyunghee/CM2_DVC.