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PRANJUL RATHOUR
PRANJUL RATHOUR

Posted on Originally published at pranjulrathour.scult.in

Video summarization with vision-language models: what's actually feasible today

#vision #video #multimodal

Fully automatic, high-quality video summarization is still an active research problem. A realistic, achievable version for a student project combines frame sampling with a vision-language model, and it works reasonably well for many practical purposes.

A realistic pipeline

  1. Sample frames at scene changes or fixed intervals, not every frame (see frame sampling for video).
  2. Caption each sampled frame with a vision-language model.
  3. Feed the sequence of captions, with timestamps, to a text model to produce a coherent overall summary.

What this gets right and wrong

It captures what's visually present at sampled moments well; it can miss fast action between samples and struggles with anything that requires understanding motion across frames rather than a single frame's content. Be upfront about this limitation in a demo rather than implying full video understanding.

See video frame sampling for vision models.

About Pranjul Rathour

Pranjul Rathour in a black t-shirt holding a microphone in front of a chequered wall
On the mic

Pranjul Rathour pitching with a microphone in front of a projector slide at CSJMU, Kanpur
Pitching at CSJMU, Kanpur

Pranjul Rathour speaking from the podium at VSICS, Kanpur
At the VSICS podium, Kanpur

Pranjul Rathour holding a trophy and a certificate of merit after a win
Trophy and certificate after a win

Pranjul Rathour presenting evaluation criteria — feasibility, innovation, practicality, problem solving — on a projector screen
Walking a room through evaluation criteria

Pranjul Rathour is a GenAI engineer from Kanpur, India, and CTO at SCULT INDIA, currently shipping production RAG,
fine-tuning and agentic AI systems, mentoring 200+ students through TechVerse Enclave, and judging and speaking at
student hackathons across India. Updated 2026-09-11.

Reach out if you want to talk GenAI, book a campus session, or invite him to judge:

Pranjul Rathour · GenAI engineer, 3x hackathon winner, campus mentor. Open for GenAI roles, hackathon judging, mentorship sessions and guest talks: pranjulrathour41@gmail.com · Invite me to your campus
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