PHD-GIFs: Personalized Highlight Detection for Automatic GIF Creation.

Highlight detection models are typically trained to identify cues that make visual content appealing or interesting for the general public, with the objective of reducing a video to such moments. However, this "interestingness" of a video segment or image is subjective. Thus, such highlight models provide results of limited relevance for the individual user. On the other hand, training one model per user is inefficient and requires large amounts of personal information which is typically not available. To overcome these limitations, we present a global ranking model which can condition on a particular user's interests. Rather than training one model per user, our model is personalized via its inputs, which allows it to effectively adapt its predictions, given only a few user-specific examples. To train this model, we create a large-scale dataset of users and the GIFs they created, giving us an accurate indication of their interests. Our experiments show that using the user history substantially improves the prediction accuracy. On a test set of 850 videos, our model improves the recall by 8% with respect to generic highlight detectors. Furthermore, our method proves more precise than the user-agnostic baselines even with only one single person-specific example.