Recent progress has been made in using attention based encoder-decoder framework for image and video captioning. Most existing decoders apply the attention mechanism to every generated word including both visual words (e.g., "gun" and "shooting") and non-visual words (e.g. "the", "a"). However, these non-visual words can be easily predicted using natural language model without considering visual signals or attention. Imposing attention mechanism on non-visual words could mislead and decrease the overall performance of visual captioning. Furthermore, the hierarchy of LSTMs enables more complex representation of visual data, capturing information at different scales. To address these issues, we propose a hierarchical LSTM with adaptive attention (hLSTMat) approach for image and video captioning. Specifically, the proposed framework utilizes the spatial or temporal attention for selecting specific regions or frames to predict the related words, while the adaptive attention is for deciding whether to depend on the visual information or the language context information. Also, a hierarchical LSTMs is designed to simultaneously consider both low-level visual information and high-level language context information to support the caption generation. We initially design our hLSTMat for video captioning task. Then, we further refine it and apply it to image captioning task. To demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed framework, we test our method on both video and image captioning tasks. Experimental results show that our approach achieves the state-of-the-art performance for most of the evaluation metrics on both tasks. The effect of important components is also well exploited in the ablation study.
Semantic attention has been proposed in previous work @cite_34 @cite_36 @cite_72 by adopting attributes or concepts generated by other pre-trained models to enhance captioning performance. Basically, semantic attention is able to attend to a semantically important concepts or attributes or region of interest in an image, and able to weight the relative strength of attention paid on multiple concepts @cite_34 . In addition, Yao presented Long Short-Term Memory with Attributes (LSTM-A) to integrates attributes into the successful CNNs and RNNs for image captioning. Variant architectures were constructed to feed image features and attributes into RNNs in different ways to explore the mutual but also fuzzy relationship between them. Moreover, Pan @cite_72 proposed Long Short-Term Memory with Transferred Semantic Attributes (LSTM-TSA), which takes advantages of incorporating transferred semantic attributes learnt from images and videos into sequence learning for video captioning.
@cite_36 @cite_72 @cite_34
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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 (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. 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. Recent progress in using long short-term memory (LSTM) for image captioning has motivated the exploration of their applications for video captioning. By taking a video as a sequence of features, an LSTM model is trained on video-sentence pairs and learns to associate a video to a sentence. However, most existing methods compress an entire video shot or frame into a static representation, without considering attention mechanism which allows for selecting salient features. Furthermore, existing approaches usually model the translating error, but ignore the correlations between sentence semantics and visual content. To tackle these issues, we propose a novel end-to-end framework named aLSTMs, an attention-based LSTM model with semantic consistency, to transfer videos to natural sentences. This framework integrates attention mechanism with LSTM to capture salient structures of video, and explores the correlation between multimodal representations (i.e., words and visual content) for generating sentences with rich semantic content. Specifically, we first propose an attention mechanism that uses the dynamic weighted sum of local two-dimensional convolutional neural network representations. Then, an LSTM decoder takes these visual features at time @math and the word-embedding feature at time @math @math 1 to generate important words. Finally, we use multimodal embedding to map the visual and sentence features into a joint space to guarantee the semantic consistence of the sentence description and the video visual content. Experiments on the benchmark datasets demonstrate that our method using single feature can achieve competitive or even better results than the state-of-the-art baselines for video captioning in both BLEU and METEOR. Recently, video captioning has been attracting an increasing amount of interest, due to its potential for improving accessibility and information retrieval. While existing methods rely on different kinds of visual features and model structures, they do not fully exploit relevant semantic information. We present an extensible approach to jointly leverage several sorts of visual features and semantic attributes. Our novel architecture builds on LSTMs for sentence generation, with several attention layers and two multimodal layers. The attention mechanism learns to automatically select the most salient visual features or semantic attributes, and the multimodal layer yields overall representations for the input and outputs of the sentence generation component. Experimental results on the challenging MSVD and MSR-VTT datasets show that our framework outperforms the state-of-the-art approaches, while ground truth based semantic attributes are able to further elevate the output quality to a near-human level.