AI-Driven Accessibility: Automating Audio Descriptions For Video Content
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.29284/nta1vw77Keywords:
AI, videos, visual frame, multimedia content, transcripts.Abstract
Background: Traditional audio description generation for videos often relies solely on visual frame analysis, overlooking the potential of integrating advanced natural language generation and text-to-speech technologies into a unified automated pipeline. Existing solutions are either manual or semi-automated, making them time-consuming, inconsistent, and less scalable for real-world accessibility needs, especially for visually impaired audiences.
Objective: This study aims to develop a robust audio-visual captioning framework that leverages extracted video frames and corresponding audio transcripts to produce semantically coherent and contextually relevant descriptions. By evaluating the proposed method against established video captioning approaches, the study seeks to demonstrate its effectiveness in improving descriptive accuracy and contextual depth.
Methods: The system extracts frames from user-uploaded videos at one frame per second using OpenCV. Optionally, YOLOv8 is applied for object detection to improve contextual accuracy. Captions are generated for each frame using the BLIP-2 model, and Google Text-to-Speech converts these captions into high-quality narration. The processed frames and audio are then reconstructed into a final video. Evaluation is conducted using BLEU and ROUGE metrics, along with qualitative user feedback for clarity and usefulness.
Results: Experimental evaluation shows the proposed method achieves a BLEU score of 0.82 and ROUGE score of 0.84, outperforming multiple prior studies in both metrics. Generated captions demonstrate improved contextual relevance and richer descriptions, effectively integrating scene details from visual frames and semantic cues from audio transcripts for enhanced multimedia content understanding.
Conclusion: The proposed approach effectively fuses audio and visual features, generating highly accurate captions, and offers strong potential for multimedia content applications.
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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

