Abstract Visual feature plays an important role in the video captioning task. Considering that the video content is mainly composed of the activities of salient objects, it has restricted the caption quality of current approaches which just focus on global frame features while paying less attention to the salient objects. To tackle this problem, in this paper, we design an object-aware feature for video captioning, denoted as tube feature. Firstly, Faster-RCNN is employed to extract object regions in frames, and a tube generation method is developed to connect the regions from different frames but belonging to the same object. After that, an encoder-decoder architecture is constructed for video caption generation. Specifically, the encoder is a bi-directional LSTM, which is utilized to capture the dynamic information of each tube. The decoder is a single LSTM extended with an attention model, which enables our approach to adaptively attend to the most correlated tubes when generating the caption. We evaluate our approach on two benchmark datasets: MSVD and Charades. The experimental results have demonstrated the effectiveness of tube feature in the video captioning task.