Dual-Modal Transformer with Enhanced Inter- and Intra-Modality Interactions for Image Captioning

Abstract

Image captioning is oriented towards describing an image with the best possible use of words that can provide a semantic, relatable meaning of the scenario inscribed. Different models can be used to accomplish this arduous task depending on the context and requirement of what needs to be achieved. An encoder–decoder model which uses the image feature vectors as an input to the encoder is often marked as one of the appropriate models to accomplish the captioning process. In the proposed work, a dual-modal transformer has been used which captures the intra- and inter-model interactions in a simultaneous manner within an attention block. The transformer architecture is quantitatively evaluated on a publicly available Microsoft Common Objects in Context (MS COCO) dataset yielding a Bilingual Evaluation Understudy (BLEU)-4 Score of 85.01. The efficacy of the model is evaluated on Flickr 8k, Flickr 30k datasets and MS COCO datasets and results for the same is compared and analysed with the state-of-the-art methods. The results shows that the proposed model outperformed when compared with conventional models, such as the encoder–decoder model and attention model.