Overview of Video Understanding

The inaugural chapter aims to provide the readers with a context of the rapid and transformative development of video understanding. As a special digital media, video owns the unique charm of conveying rich and vivid information, making it more and more popular on various social platforms. At the same time, video understanding techniques, which aim to recognize the objects and actions within videos and analyze their temporal evolution, are gaining increasing attention in both academia and industry, especially in the era of deep learning. A series of video tasks, benchmarks, and methods have been successively proposed, promoting this large field to becoming more and more mature. In this chapter, we will briefly introduce the above aspects and travel through the corridors of time to systematically review the chronology of this dynamic field.