Image captioning has attracted ever-increasing research attention in the multimedia community. To this end, most cutting-edge works rely on an encoder-decoder framework with attention mechanisms, which have achieved remarkable progress. However, such a framework does not consider scene concepts to attend visual information, which leads to sentence bias in caption generation and defects the performance correspondingly. We argue that such scene concepts capture higher-level visual semantics and serve as an important cue in describing images. In this paper, we propose a novel scene-based factored attention module for image captioning. Specifically, the proposed module first embeds the scene concepts into factored weights explicitly and attends the visual information extracted from the input image. Then, an adaptive LSTM is used to generate captions for specific scene types. Experimental results on Microsoft COCO benchmark show that the proposed scene-based attention module improves model performance a lot, which outperforms the state-of-the-art approaches under various evaluation metrics.
Nanyang Technological University（南洋理工大学）；Salesforce Research Asia（Salesforce亚洲研究院）；Monash University（莫纳什大学）；Adobe Research（Adobe研究院）；Alibaba Group（阿里巴巴集团）
Most of current image captioning models heavily rely on paired image-caption datasets. However, getting large scale image-caption paired data is labor-intensive and time-consuming. In this paper, we present a scene graph-based approach for unpaired image captioning. Our framework comprises an image scene graph generator, a sentence scene graph generator, a scene graph encoder, and a sentence decoder. Specifically, we first train the scene graph encoder and the sentence decoder on the text modality. To align the scene graphs between images and sentences, we propose an unsupervised feature align…
University of Wisconsin-Madison（威斯康星大学麦迪逊分校）；Tencent AI Lab（腾讯人工智能实验室）
We address the challenging problem of image captioning by revisiting the representation of image scene graph. At the core of our method lies the decomposition of a scene graph into a set of sub-graphs, with each sub-graph capturing a semantic component of the input image. We design a deep model to select important sub-graphs, and to decode each selected sub-graph into a single target sentence. By using sub-graphs, our model is able to attend to different components of the image. Our method thus accounts for accurate, diverse, grounded and controllable captioning at the same time. We present ex…
Max Planck Institute for Informatics（马克斯·普朗克信息学研究所）
Gaze reflects how humans process visual scenes and is therefore increasingly used in computer vision systems. Previous works demonstrated the potential of gaze for object-centric tasks, such as object localization and recognition, but it remains unclear if gaze can also be beneficial for scene-centric tasks, such as image captioning. We present a new perspective on gaze-assisted image captioning by studying the interplay between human gaze and the attention mechanism of deep neural networks. Using a public large-scale gaze dataset, we first assess the relationship between state-of-the-art obje…
Sony Interactive Entertainment LLC（索尼互动娱乐有限责任公司）；Georgia Institute of Technology（佐治亚理工学院）；State University of New York at Binghamton（纽约州立大学宾汉姆顿分校）
Image captioning has attracted considerable attention in recent years. However, little work has been done for game image captioning which has some unique characteristics and requirements. In this work we propose a novel game image captioning model which integrates bottom-up attention with a new multi-level residual top-down attention mechanism. Firstly, a lower-level residual top-down attention network is added to the Faster R-CNN based bottom-up attention network to address the problem that the latter may lose important spatial information when extracting regional features. Secondly, an upper…
University of California San Diego（加利福尼亚大学圣迭戈分校）；Intel Labs（英特尔实验室）；University of Warwick（华威大学）
The mainstream image captioning models rely on Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) image features to generate captions via recurrent models. Recently, image scene graphs have been used to augment captioning models so as to leverage their structural semantics, such as object entities, relationships and attributes. Several studies have noted that the naive use of scene graphs from a black-box scene graph generator harms image captioning performance and that scene graph-based captioning models have to incur the overhead of explicit use of image features to generate decent captions. Addressing thes…
Image captioning is shown to be able to achieve a better performance by using scene graphs to represent the relations of objects in the image. The current captioning encoders generally use a Graph Convolutional Net (GCN) to represent the relation information and merge it with the object region features via concatenation or convolution to get the final input for sentence decoding. However, the GCN-based encoders in the existing methods are less effective for captioning due to two reasons. First, using the image captioning as the objective (i.e., Maximum Likelihood Estimation) rather than a rela…
KU Leuven（鲁汶大学）；New York University（纽约大学）；ILLC, University of Amsterdam（阿姆斯特丹大学逻辑、语言与计算研究所）
Many top-performing image captioning models rely solely on object features computed with an object detection model to generate image descriptions. However, recent studies propose to directly use scene graphs to introduce information about object relations into captioning, hoping to better describe interactions between objects. In this work, we thoroughly investigate the use of scene graphs in image captioning. We empirically study whether using additional scene graph encoders can lead to better image descriptions and propose a conditional graph attention network (C-GAT), where the image captio…
The Devil is in the Distributions: Explicit Modeling of Scene Content is Key in Zero-Shot Video Captioning
School of Computer Science and Technology, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学计算机科学与技术学院）；Macquarie University（麦考瑞大学）；Australian Institute for Machine Learning, The University of Adelaide（阿德莱德大学澳大利亚机器学习研究所）
Technical University of Munich（慕尼黑工业大学）；University College London（伦敦大学学院）；LMU Munich（慕尼黑大学）
We investigate the incorporation of visual relationships into the task of supervised image caption generation by proposing a model that leverages detected objects and auto-generated visual relationships to describe images in natural language. To do so, we first generate a scene graph from raw image pixels by identifying individual objects and visual relationships between them. This scene graph then serves as input to our graph-to-text model, which generates the final caption. In contrast to previous approaches, our model thus explicitly models the detection of objects and visual relationships …
We propose Scene Graph Auto-Encoder (SGAE) that incorporates the language inductive bias into the encoder-decoder image captioning framework for more human-like captions. Intuitively, we humans use the inductive bias to compose collocations and contextual inference in discourse. For example, when we see the relation `person on bike', it is natural to replace `on' with `ride' and infer `person riding bike on a road' even the `road' is not evident. Therefore, exploiting such bias as a language prior is expected to help the conventional encoder-decoder models less likely overfit to the dataset bi…
Visual attention plays an important role to understand images and demonstrates its effectiveness in generating natural language descriptions of images. On the other hand, recent studies show that language associated with an image can steer visual attention in the scene during our cognitive process. Inspired by this, we introduce a text-guided attention model for image captioning, which learns to drive visual attention using associated captions. For this model, we propose an exemplar-based learning approach that retrieves from training data associated captions with each image, and use them to l…
Grounding language to visual relations is critical to various language-and-vision applications. In this work, we tackle two fundamental language-and-vision tasks: image-text matching and image captioning, and demonstrate that neural scene graph generators can learn effective visual relation features to facilitate grounding language to visual relations and subsequently improve the two end applications. By combining relation features with the state-of-the-art models, our experiments show significant improvement on the standard Flickr30K and MSCOCO benchmarks. Our experimental results and analysi…
DualCap: Enhancing Lightweight Image Captioning via Dual Retrieval with Similar Scenes Visual Prompts
Institute of Information Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院信息工程研究所）；School of Cyber Security, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学网络安全学院）
College of Computer Science and Technology, Zhejiang University（浙江大学计算机科学与技术学院）
Stylized image captioning systems aim to generate a caption not only semantically related to a given image but also consistent with a given style description. One of the biggest challenges with this task is the lack of sufficient paired stylized data. Many studies focus on unsupervised approaches, without considering from the perspective of data augmentation. We begin with the observation that people may recall similar emotions when they are in similar scenes, and often express similar emotions with similar style phrases, which underpins our data augmentation idea. In this paper, we propose a …
Image captioning can be improved if the structure of the graphical representations can be formulated with conceptual positional binding. In this work, we have introduced a novel technique for caption generation using the neural-symbolic encoding of the scene-graphs, derived from regional visual information of the images and we call it Tensor Product Scene-Graph-Triplet Representation (TP$_{sgt}$R). While, most of the previous works concentrated on identification of the object features in images, we introduce a neuro-symbolic embedding that can embed identified relationships among different reg…
Controllable Image Captioning with Prompt-Conditioned Scene Rewards
POSTECH（浦项科技大学）；Graduate School of Artificial Intelligence, POSTECH（浦项科技大学人工智能研究生院）；Department of Computer Science and Engineering, POSTECH（浦项科技大学计算机科学与工程系）
Renmin University of China（中国人民大学）；INRIA（法国国家信息与自动化研究所）
For an image with multiple scene texts, different people may be interested in different text information. Current text-aware image captioning models are not able to generate distinctive captions according to various information needs. To explore how to generate personalized text-aware captions, we define a new challenging task, namely Question-controlled Text-aware Image Captioning (Qc-TextCap). With questions as control signals, this task requires models to understand questions, find related scene texts and describe them together with objects fluently in human language. Based on two existing …
The Australian National University（澳大利亚国立大学）；Macquarie University（麦考瑞大学）
Existing image captioning models do not generalize well to out-of-domain images containing novel scenes or objects. This limitation severely hinders the use of these models in real world applications dealing with images in the wild. We address this problem using a flexible approach that enables existing deep captioning architectures to take advantage of image taggers at test time, without re-training. Our method uses constrained beam search to force the inclusion of selected tag words in the output, and fixed, pretrained word embeddings to facilitate vocabulary expansion to previously unseen t…
Automatically captioning images with natural language sentences is an important research topic. State of the art models are able to produce human-like sentences. These models typically describe the depicted scene as a whole and do not target specific objects of interest or emotional relationships between these objects in the image. However, marketing companies require to describe these important attributes of a given scene. In our case, objects of interest are consumer goods, which are usually identifiable by a product logo and are associated with certain brands. From a marketing point of view…
Institute of Mathematics of the Romanian Academy（罗马尼亚科学院数学研究所）；Lund University（隆德大学）
Automatic video captioning is challenging due to the complex interactions in dynamic real scenes. A comprehensive system would ultimately localize and track the objects, actions and interactions present in a video and generate a description that relies on temporal localization in order to ground the visual concepts. However, most existing automatic video captioning systems map from raw video data to high level textual description, bypassing localization and recognition, thus discarding potentially valuable information for content localization and generalization. In this work we present an auto…
The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology（香港科技大学）；Tencent（腾讯）
State-of-the-art image captioning methods mostly focus on improving visual features, less attention has been paid to utilizing the inherent properties of language to boost captioning performance. In this paper, we show that vocabulary coherence between words and syntactic paradigm of sentences are also important to generate high-quality image caption. Following the conventional encoder-decoder framework, we propose the Reflective Decoding Network (RDN) for image captioning, which enhances both the long-sequence dependency and position perception of words in a caption decoder. Our model learns …
Georgia Institute of Technology（佐治亚理工学院）；NEC Laboratories America（NEC美国实验室）；Georgia Tech Research Institute（佐治亚理工研究院）
We address the problem of video captioning by grounding language generation on object interactions in the video. Existing work mostly focuses on overall scene understanding with often limited or no emphasis on object interactions to address the problem of video understanding. In this paper, we propose SINet-Caption that learns to generate captions grounded over higher-order interactions between arbitrary groups of objects for fine-grained video understanding. We discuss the challenges and benefits of such an approach. We further demonstrate state-of-the-art results on the ActivityNet Captions …
Current video captioning approaches often suffer from problems of missing objects in the video to be described, while generating captions semantically similar with ground truth sentences. In this paper, we propose a new approach to video captioning that can describe objects detected by object detection, and generate captions having similar meaning with correct captions. Our model relies on S2VT, a sequence-to-sequence model for video captioning. Given a sequence of video frames, the encoding RNN takes a frame as well as detected objects in the frame in order to incorporate the information of t…
South China University of Technology（华南理工大学）；Pazhou Laboratory（琶洲实验室）；University of Adelaide（阿德莱德大学）
Text-based image captioning (TextCap) which aims to read and reason images with texts is crucial for a machine to understand a detailed and complex scene environment, considering that texts are omnipresent in daily life. This task, however, is very challenging because an image often contains complex texts and visual information that is hard to be described comprehensively. Existing methods attempt to extend the traditional image captioning methods to solve this task, which focus on describing the overall scene of images by one global caption. This is infeasible because the complex text and vis…
University of Electronic Science and Technology of China（电子科技大学）
Video captioning is a challenging task that necessitates a thorough comprehension of visual scenes. Existing methods follow a typical one-to-one mapping, which concentrates on a limited sample space while ignoring the intrinsic semantic associations between samples, resulting in rigid and uninformative expressions. To address this issue, we propose a novel and flexible framework, namely Support-set based Multi-modal Representation Enhancement (SMRE) model, to mine rich information in a semantic subspace shared between samples. Specifically, we propose a Support-set Construction (SC) module to …
Technische Universität München（慕尼黑工业大学）；University of Oxford（牛津大学）
Understanding images without explicit supervision has become an important problem in computer vision. In this paper, we address image captioning by generating language descriptions of scenes without learning from annotated pairs of images and their captions. The core component of our approach is a shared latent space that is structured by visual concepts. In this space, the two modalities should be indistinguishable. A language model is first trained to encode sentences into semantically structured embeddings. Image features that are translated into this embedding space can be decoded into des…
Da Yu: Towards USV-Based Image Captioning for Waterway Surveillance and Scene Understanding
Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou)（香港科技大学（广州））；Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Hong Kong SAR, China（香港科技大学，香港特别行政区，中国）；Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University（西安交通大学利物浦大学）；China University of Petroleum (East China)（中国石油大学（华东））；University of Science and Technology of China（中国科学技术大学）；Yancheng Institute of Technology（盐城职业技术学院）；Wuhan University of Technology（武汉理工大学）
本文提出了首个水道图像描述数据集 WaterCaption 及边缘可部署的多模态大模型 Da Yu，通过新型视觉到语言投影器 NTA 平衡计算效率与细粒度建模，在多项基准上达到最优性能。
Aalto University（阿尔托大学）；Max Planck Institute for Informatics（马克斯·普朗克信息学研究所）；University of Central Florida（中佛罗里达大学）
To bridge the gap between humans and machines in image understanding and describing, we need further insight into how people describe a perceived scene. In this paper, we study the agreement between bottom-up saliency-based visual attention and object referrals in scene description constructs. We investigate the properties of human-written descriptions and machine-generated ones. We then propose a saliency-boosted image captioning model in order to investigate benefits from low-level cues in language models. We learn that (1) humans mention more salient objects earlier than less salient ones i…
Captioning is a crucial and challenging task for video understanding. In videos that involve active agents such as humans, the agent's actions can bring about myriad changes in the scene. Observable changes such as movements, manipulations, and transformations of the objects in the scene, are reflected in conventional video captioning. Unlike images, actions in videos are also inherently linked to social aspects such as intentions (why the action is taking place), effects (what changes due to the action), and attributes that describe the agent. Thus for video understanding, such as when captio…
Stylized image captioning as presented in prior work aims to generate captions that reflect characteristics beyond a factual description of the scene composition, such as sentiments. Such prior work relies on given sentiment identifiers, which are used to express a certain global style in the caption, e.g. positive or negative, however without taking into account the stylistic content of the visual scene. To address this shortcoming, we first analyze the limitations of current stylized captioning datasets and propose COCO attribute-based augmentations to obtain varied stylized captions from CO…
Zhejiang University（浙江大学）；Columbia University（哥伦比亚大学）；Hong Kong University of Science and Technology（香港科技大学）
Distinctive Image Captioning (DIC) -- generating distinctive captions that describe the unique details of a target image -- has received considerable attention over the last few years. A recent DIC work proposes to generate distinctive captions by comparing the target image with a set of semantic-similar reference images, i.e., reference-based DIC (Ref-DIC). It aims to make the generated captions can tell apart the target and reference images. Unfortunately, reference images used by existing Ref-DIC works are easy to distinguish: these reference images only resemble the target image at scene-l…
It is encouraged to see that progress has been made to bridge videos and natural language. However, mainstream video captioning methods suffer from slow inference speed due to the sequential manner of autoregressive decoding, and prefer generating generic descriptions due to the insufficient training of visual words (e.g., nouns and verbs) and inadequate decoding paradigm. In this paper, we propose a non-autoregressive decoding based model with a coarse-to-fine captioning procedure to alleviate these defects. In implementations, we employ a bi-directional self-attention based network as our la…
Fudan University（复旦大学）；Research Institute of Intelligent and Complex Systems, Fudan University（复旦大学智能复杂系统研究院）；Zhejiang Lab（之江实验室）
Existing research for image captioning usually represents an image using a scene graph with low-level facts (objects and relations) and fails to capture the high-level semantics. In this paper, we propose a Theme Concepts extended Image Captioning (TCIC) framework that incorporates theme concepts to represent high-level cross-modality semantics. In practice, we model theme concepts as memory vectors and propose Transformer with Theme Nodes (TTN) to incorporate those vectors for image captioning. Considering that theme concepts can be learned from both images and captions, we propose two settin…
The task of video captioning, that is, the automatic generation of sentences describing a sequence of actions in a video, has attracted an increasing attention recently. The complex and high-dimensional representation of video data makes it difficult for a typical encoder-decoder architectures to recognize relevant features and encode them in a proper format. Video data contains different modalities that can be recognized using a mix image, scene, action and audio features. In this paper, we characterize the different features affecting video descriptions and explore the interactions among the…
National University of Computer and Emerging Sciences（国立计算机与新兴科学大学）；Hamad Bin Khalifa University（哈马德·本·哈利法大学）；Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia（意大利技术研究院）
The use of attention models for automated image captioning has enabled many systems to produce accurate and meaningful descriptions for images. Over the years, many novel approaches have been proposed to enhance the attention process using different feature representations. In this paper, we extend this approach by creating a guided attention network mechanism, that exploits the relationship between the visual scene and text-descriptions using spatial features from the image, high-level information from the topics, and temporal context from caption generation, which are embedded together in an…
Nanyang Technological University（南洋理工大学）；Singapore Management University（新加坡管理大学）；Salesforce Research Asia（Salesforce亚洲研究院）
Video captioning targets interpreting the complex visual contents as text descriptions, which requires the model to fully understand video scenes including objects and their interactions. Prevailing methods adopt off-the-shelf object detection networks to give object proposals and use the attention mechanism to model the relations between objects. They often miss some undefined semantic concepts of the pretrained model and fail to identify exact predicate relationships between objects. In this paper, we investigate an open research task of generating text descriptions for the given videos, and…
Centro de Investigación en Ciencias de Información Geoespacial AC (CentroGEO)（地理空间信息科学研究中心（CentroGEO））；Consejo Nacional de Ciencia y Tecnología (CONACyT)（国家科学技术委员会（CONACyT））
Image Captioning is a current research task to describe the image content using the objects and their relationships in the scene. To tackle this task, two important research areas converge, artificial vision, and natural language processing. In Image Captioning, as in any computational intelligence task, the performance metrics are crucial for knowing how well (or bad) a method performs. In recent years, it has been observed that classical metrics based on n-grams are insufficient to capture the semantics and the critical meaning to describe the content in an image. Looking to measure how well…
Indian Institute of Technology, Madras（印度理工学院马德拉斯分校）；Queen Marys College, Chennai（钦奈玛丽皇后学院）；National Institute of Technology（国家理工学院）
There is amazing progress in Deep Learning based models for Image captioning and Low Light image enhancement. For the first time in literature, this paper develops a Deep Learning model that translates night scenes to sentences, opening new possibilities for AI applications in the safety of visually impaired women. Inspired by Image Captioning and Visual Question Answering, a novel Interactive Image Captioning is developed. A user can make the AI focus on any chosen person of interest by influencing the attention scoring. Attention context vectors are computed from CNN feature vectors and user…
