FocusedAD: Character-centric Movie Audio Description

Movie Audio Description (AD) aims to narrate visual content during dialogue-free segments, particularly benefiting blind and visually impaired (BVI) audiences. Compared with general video captioning, AD demands plot-relevant narration with explicit character name references, posing unique challenges in moviethis http URLidentify active main characters and focus on storyline-relevant regions, we propose FocusedAD, a novel framework that delivers character-centric movie audio descriptions. It includes: (i) a Character Perception Module(CPM) for tracking character regions and linking them to names; (ii) a Dynamic Prior Module(DPM) that injects contextual cues from prior ADs and subtitles via learnable soft prompts; and (iii) a Focused Caption Module(FCM) that generates narrations enriched with plot-relevant details and named characters. To overcome limitations in character identification, we also introduce an automated pipeline for building character query banks. FocusedAD achieves state-of-the-art performance on multiple benchmarks, including strong zero-shot results on MAD-eval-Named and our newly proposed Cinepile-AD dataset. Code and data will be released atthis https URL.

@article{ye2025_2504.12157,
  title={ FocusedAD: Character-centric Movie Audio Description },
  author={ Xiaojun Ye and Chun Wang and Yiren Song and Sheng Zhou and Liangcheng Li and Jiajun Bu },
  journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2504.12157},
  year={ 2025 }
}