The workflow of extracting features from images using convolutional neural networks (CNN) and generating captions with recurrent neural networks (RNN) has become a de-facto standard for image captioning task. However, since CNN features are originally designed for classification task, it is mostly concerned with the main conspicuous element of the image, and often fails to correctly convey information on local, secondary elements. We propose to incorporate coding with vector of locally aggregated descriptors (VLAD) on spatial pyramid for CNN features of sub-regions in order to generate image representations that better reflect the local information of the images. Our results show that our method of compact VLAD coding can match CNN features with as little as 3 of dimensionality and, when combined with spatial pyramid, it results in image captions that more accurately take local elements into account.
@cite_17: In recent years, VLAD has become a popular method which encoding powerful local descriptors to the compact representations. By using this approach, an image can be represented by just a few dozen bytes while preserving excellent retrieval results after the dimensionality reduction and compression. However, throwing away the spatial information is one of the biggest weaknesses of VLAD. This paper adopts the spatial pyramid pooling method to incorporate the spatial information into the VLAD vectors. Furthermore, a new normalization method is proposed to hold this advantage. By the proposed method, the performance of VLAD can be boosted through combining spatial information. The experimental results show that our approach outperforms VLAD in almost all configurations.
Although spatial pyramid can find useful global features from each level, it has been reported to be weak at high geometric variability, necessitating a combination with invariant features. On the other hand, VLAD coding is usually performed on locally invariable descriptors, such as SIFT, yet it does not preserve spatial information. In order to compensate for these mutual weaknesses, @cite_17 introduced spatial pyramid VLAD, which combines the two. This technique will play a central role in the method introduced in our paper.