Script-to-Storyboard: A new contextual retrieval dataset and benchmark

Storyboards comprising key illustrations and images help filmmakers to outline ideas, key moments, and story events when filming movies. Inspired by this, we introduce the first contextual benchmark dataset Script-to-Storyboard (Sc2St) composed of storyboards to explicitly express story structures in the movie domain, and propose the contextual retrieval task to facilitate movie story understanding. The Sc2St dataset contains fine-grained and diverse texts, annotated semantic keyframes, and coherent storylines in storyboards, unlike existing movie datasets. The contextual retrieval task takes as input a multi-sentence movie script summary with keyframe history and aims to retrieve a future keyframe described by a corresponding sentence to form the storyboard. Compared to classic text-based visual retrieval tasks, this requires capturing the context from the description (script) and keyframe history. We benchmark existing text-based visual retrieval methods on the new dataset and propose a recurrent-based framework with three variants for effective context encoding. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that our methods compare favourably to existing methods; ablation studies validate the effectiveness of the proposed context encoding approaches.