Image captions: global-local and joint signals attention model (GL-JSAM)

For automated visual captioning, existing neural encoder-decoder methods commonly use a simple sequence-to-sequence or an attention-based mechanism. The attention-based models pay attention to specific visual areas or objects; using a single heat map that indicates which portion of the image is most important rather than treating the objects (within the image) equally. These models are usually a mixture of Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) and Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) architectures. CNN’s generally extract global visual signals that only provide global information of main objects, attributes, and their relationship, but fail to provide local (regional) information within objects, such as lines, corners, curve and edges. On one hand, missing some of the information and details of local visual signals may lead to misprediction, misidentification of objects or completely missing the main object(s). On the other hand, additional visual signals information produces meaningless and irrelevant description, which may be coming from objects in foreground or background. To address these concerns, we created a new joint signals attention image captioning model for global and local signals that is adaptive by nature. Primarily, proposed model extracts global visual signals at image-level and local visual signals at object-level. The joint signal attention model (JSAM) plays a dual role in visual signal extraction and non-visual signal prediction. Initially, JSAM selects meaningful global and regional visual signals to discard irrelevant visual signals and integrates selected visual signals smartly. Subsequently, in a language model, smart JSAM decides at each time-step (level) on how to attend visual or non-visual signals to generate accurate, descriptive, and elegant sentences. Lastly, we examine the efficiency and superiority of the projected model over recent similar image captioning models by conducting essential experimentations on the MS-COCO dataset.