Recently, there has been a lot of interest in automatically generating descriptions for an image. Most existing language-model based approaches for this task learn to generate an image description word by word in its original word order. However, for humans, it is more natural to locate the objects and their relationships first, and then elaborate on each object, describing notable attributes. We present a coarse-to-fine method that decomposes the original image description into a skeleton sentence and its attributes, and generates the skeleton sentence and attribute phrases separately. By this decomposition, our method can generate more accurate and novel descriptions than the previous state-of-the-art. Experimental results on the MS-COCO and a larger scale Stock3M datasets show that our algorithm yields consistent improvements across different evaluation metrics, especially on the SPICE metric, which has much higher correlation with human ratings than the conventional metrics. Furthermore, our algorithm can generate descriptions with varied length, benefiting from the separate control of the skeleton and attributes. This enables image description generation that better accommodates user preferences.
Language model-based methods typically learn the common embedding space of images and captions, and generate novel captions without many rigid syntactical constraints. Kiros and Zemel @cite_30 propose multimodal log-bilinear models conditioned on image features. Mao al @cite_0 propose a Multimodal Recurrent Neural Network (MRNN) that uses an RNN to learn the text embedding, and a CNN to learn the image representation. Vinyals al @cite_40 use LSTM as the decoder to generate sentences, and provide the image features as input to the LSTM directly. Xu al @cite_51 further introduce an attention-based model that can learn where to look while generating corresponding words. You al @cite_4 use pre-generated semantic concept proposals to guide the caption generation, and learn to selectively attend to those concepts at different time-steps. Similarly, Wu al @cite_50 also show that high level semantic features can improve the caption generation performance.
@cite_30 @cite_4 @cite_0 @cite_40 @cite_50 @cite_51
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Automatically generating natural language descriptions of videos plays a fundamental challenge for computer vision community. Most recent progress in this problem has been achieved through employing 2-D and or 3-D Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) to encode video content and Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs) to decode a sentence. In this paper, we present Long Short-Term Memory with Transferred Semantic Attributes (LSTM-TSA)&#x2014;a novel deep architecture that incorporates the transferred semantic attributes learnt from images and videos into the CNN plus RNN framework, by training them in an end-to-end manner. The design of LSTM-TSA is highly inspired by the facts that 1) semantic attributes play a significant contribution to captioning, and 2) images and videos carry complementary semantics and thus can reinforce each other for captioning. To boost video captioning, we propose a novel transfer unit to model the mutually correlated attributes learnt from images and videos. Extensive experiments are conducted on three public datasets, i.e., MSVD, M-VAD and MPII-MD. Our proposed LSTM-TSA achieves to-date the best published performance in sentence generation on MSVD: 52.8 and 74.0 in terms of BLEU@4 and CIDEr-D. Superior results are also reported on M-VAD and MPII-MD when compared to state-of-the-art methods. Automatically generating natural language descriptions of videos plays a fundamental challenge for computer vision community. Most recent progress in this problem has been achieved through employing 2-D and or 3-D Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) to encode video content and Recurrent Neural Networks (RNN) to decode a sentence. In this paper, we present Long Short-Term Memory with Transferred Semantic Attributes (LSTM-TSA)---a novel deep architecture that incorporates the transferred semantic attributes learnt from images and videos into the CNN plus RNN framework, by training them in an end-to-end manner. The design of LSTM-TSA is highly inspired by the facts that 1) semantic attributes play a significant contribution to captioning, and 2) images and videos carry complementary semantics and thus can reinforce each other for captioning. To boost video captioning, we propose a novel transfer unit to model the mutually correlated attributes learnt from images and videos. Extensive experiments are conducted on three public datasets, i.e., MSVD, M-VAD and MPII-MD. Our proposed LSTM-TSA achieves to-date the best published performance in sentence generation on MSVD: 52.8 and 74.0 in terms of BLEU@4 and CIDEr-D. Superior results when compared to state-of-the-art methods are also reported on M-VAD and MPII-MD. We address the problem of dense visual-semantic embedding that maps not only full sentences and whole images but also phrases within sentences and salient regions within images into a multimodal embedding space. Such dense embeddings, when applied to the task of image captioning, enable us to produce several region-oriented and detailed phrases rather than just an overview sentence to describe an image. Specifically, we present a hierarchical structured recurrent neural network (RNN), namely Hierarchical Multimodal LSTM (HM-LSTM). Compared with chain structured RNN, our proposed model exploits the hierarchical relations between sentences and phrases, and between whole images and image regions, to jointly establish their representations. Without the need of any supervised labels, our proposed model automatically learns the fine-grained correspondences between phrases and image regions towards the dense embedding. Extensive experiments on several datasets validate the efficacy of our method, which compares favorably with the state-of-the-art methods. Two recent approaches have achieved state-of-the-art results in image captioning. The first uses a pipelined process where a set of candidate words is generated by a convolutional neural network (CNN) trained on images, and then a maximum entropy (ME) language model is used to arrange these words into a coherent sentence. The second uses the penultimate activation layer of the CNN as input to a recurrent neural network (RNN) that then generates the caption sequence. In this paper, we compare the merits of these different language modeling approaches for the first time by using the same state-of-the-art CNN as input. We examine issues in the different approaches, including linguistic irregularities, caption repetition, and data set overlap. By combining key aspects of the ME and RNN methods, we achieve a new record performance over previously published results on the benchmark COCO dataset. However, the gains we see in BLEU do not translate to human judgments.