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_11: This paper presents a novel approach for automatically generating image descriptions: visual detectors, language models, and multimodal similarity models learnt directly from a dataset of image captions. We use multiple instance learning to train visual detectors for words that commonly occur in captions, including many different parts of speech such as nouns, verbs, and adjectives. The word detector outputs serve as conditional inputs to a maximum-entropy language model. The language model learns from a set of over 400,000 image descriptions to capture the statistics of word usage. We capture global semantics by re-ranking caption candidates using sentence-level features and a deep multimodal similarity model. Our system is state-of-the-art on the official Microsoft COCO benchmark, producing a BLEU-4 score of 29.1 . When human judges compare the system captions to ones written by other people on our held-out test set, the system captions have equal or better quality 34 of the time.
@cite_11 took a more linguistically inspired approach by training visual detectors for words with multiple instance learning, which learns to extract nouns, verbs, and adjectives from regions in the image. Maximum-entropy language model generates a set of candidates, which are re-ranked by sentence-level features and deep multimodal similarity model. Our model differs from this work in that we explicitly take local objects into consideration rather than approximating from multiple instances.