text: We introduce a model for bidirectional retrieval of images and sentences through a multi-modal embedding of visual and natural language data. Unlike previous models that directly map images or sentences into a common embedding space, our model works on a finer level and embeds fragments of images (objects) and fragments of sentences (typed dependency tree relations) into a common space. In addition to a ranking objective seen in previous work, this allows us to add a new fragment alignment objective that learns to directly associate these fragments across modalities. Extensive experimental evaluation shows that reasoning on both the global level of images and sentences and the finer level of their respective fragments significantly improves performance on image-sentence retrieval tasks. Additionally, our model provides interpretable predictions since the inferred inter-modal fragment alignment is explicit.
  @cite_30: We propose a sentence generation strategy that describes images by predicting the most likely nouns, verbs, scenes and prepositions that make up the core sentence structure. The input are initial noisy estimates of the objects and scenes detected in the image using state of the art trained detectors. As predicting actions from still images directly is unreliable, we use a language model trained from the English Gigaword corpus to obtain their estimates; together with probabilities of co-located nouns, scenes and prepositions. We use these estimates as parameters on a HMM that models the sentence generation process, with hidden nodes as sentence components and image detections as the emissions. Experimental results show that our strategy of combining vision and language produces readable and descriptive sentences compared to naive strategies that use vision alone.
  @cite_35: Sentences that describe visual scenes contain a wide variety of information pertaining to the presence of objects, their attributes and their spatial relations. In this paper we learn the visual features that correspond to semantic phrases derived from sentences. Specifically, we extract predicate tuples that contain two nouns and a relation. The relation may take several forms, such as a verb, preposition, adjective or their combination. We model a scene using a Conditional Random Field (CRF) formulation where each node corresponds to an object, and the edges to their relations. We determine the potentials of the CRF using the tuples extracted from the sentences. We generate novel scenes depicting the sentences' visual meaning by sampling from the CRF. The CRF is also used to score a set of scenes for a text-based image retrieval task. Our results show we can generate (retrieve) scenes that convey the desired semantic meaning, even when scenes (queries) are described by multiple sentences. Significant improvement is found over several baseline approaches.
  @cite_14: We develop and demonstrate automatic image description methods using a large captioned photo collection. One contribution is our technique for the automatic collection of this new dataset – performing a huge number of Flickr queries and then filtering the noisy results down to 1 million images with associated visually relevant captions. Such a collection allows us to approach the extremely challenging problem of description generation using relatively simple non-parametric methods and produces surprisingly effective results. We also develop methods incorporating many state of the art, but fairly noisy, estimates of image content to produce even more pleasing results. Finally we introduce a new objective performance measure for image captioning.
  @cite_22: We posit that visually descriptive language offers computer vision researchers both information about the world, and information about how people describe the world. The potential benefit from this source is made more significant due to the enormous amount of language data easily available today. We present a system to automatically generate natural language descriptions from images that exploits both statistics gleaned from parsing large quantities of text data and recognition algorithms from computer vision. The system is very effective at producing relevant sentences for images. It also generates descriptions that are notably more true to the specific image content than previous work.
  @cite_1: In this paper, we present an image parsing to text description (I2T) framework that generates text descriptions of image and video content based on image understanding. The proposed I2T framework follows three steps: 1) input images (or video frames) are decomposed into their constituent visual patterns by an image parsing engine, in a spirit similar to parsing sentences in natural language; 2) the image parsing results are converted into semantic representation in the form of Web ontology language (OWL), which enables seamless integration with general knowledge bases; and 3) a text generation engine converts the results from previous steps into semantically meaningful, human readable, and query-able text reports. The centerpiece of the I2T framework is an and-or graph (AoG) visual knowledge representation, which provides a graphical representation serving as prior knowledge for representing diverse visual patterns and provides top-down hypotheses during the image parsing. The AoG embodies vocabularies of visual elements including primitives, parts, objects, scenes as well as a stochastic image grammar that specifies syntactic relations (i.e., compositional) and semantic relations (e.g., categorical, spatial, temporal, and functional) between these visual elements. Therefore, the AoG is a unified model of both categorical and symbolic representations of visual knowledge. The proposed I2T framework has two objectives. First, we use semiautomatic method to parse images from the Internet in order to build an AoG for visual knowledge representation. Our goal is to make the parsing process more and more automatic using the learned AoG model. Second, we use automatic methods to parse image video in specific domains and generate text reports that are useful for real-world applications. In the case studies at the end of this paper, we demonstrate two automatic I2T systems: a maritime and urban scene video surveillance system and a real-time automatic driving scene understanding system.
  @cite_32: This paper introduces a novel generation system that composes humanlike descriptions of images from computer vision detections. By leveraging syntactically informed word co-occurrence statistics, the generator filters and constrains the noisy detections output from a vision system to generate syntactic trees that detail what the computer vision system sees. Results show that the generation system outperforms state-of-the-art systems, automatically generating some of the most natural image descriptions to date.
  @cite_6: We present a holistic data-driven approach to image description generation, exploiting the vast amount of (noisy) parallel image data and associated natural language descriptions available on the web. More specifically, given a query image, we retrieve existing human-composed phrases used to describe visually similar images, then selectively combine those phrases to generate a novel description for the query image. We cast the generation process as constraint optimization problems, collectively incorporating multiple interconnected aspects of language composition for content planning, surface realization and discourse structure. Evaluation by human annotators indicates that our final system generates more semantically correct and linguistically appealing descriptions than two nontrivial baselines.
  @cite_27: Humans can prepare concise descriptions of pictures, focusing on what they find important. We demonstrate that automatic methods can do so too. We describe a system that can compute a score linking an image to a sentence. This score can be used to attach a descriptive sentence to a given image, or to obtain images that illustrate a given sentence. The score is obtained by comparing an estimate of meaning obtained from the image to one obtained from the sentence. Each estimate of meaning comes from a discriminative procedure that is learned us-ingdata. We evaluate on a novel dataset consisting of human-annotated images. While our underlying estimate of meaning is impoverished, it is sufficient to produce very good quantitative results, evaluated with a novel score that can account for synecdoche.
  @cite_23: Studying natural language, and especially how people describe the world around them can help us better understand the visual world. In turn, it can also help us in the quest to generate natural language that describes this world in a human manner. We present a simple yet effective approach to automatically compose image descriptions given computer vision based inputs and using web-scale n-grams. Unlike most previous work that summarizes or retrieves pre-existing text relevant to an image, our method composes sentences entirely from scratch. Experimental results indicate that it is viable to generate simple textual descriptions that are pertinent to the specific content of an image, while permitting creativity in the description -- making for more human-like annotations than previous approaches.
  @cite_31: The ability to associate images with natural language sentences that describe what is depicted in them is a hallmark of image understanding, and a prerequisite for applications such as sentence-based image search. In analogy to image search, we propose to frame sentence-based image annotation as the task of ranking a given pool of captions. We introduce a new benchmark collection for sentence-based image description and search, consisting of 8,000 images that are each paired with five different captions which provide clear descriptions of the salient entities and events. We introduce a number of systems that perform quite well on this task, even though they are only based on features that can be obtained with minimal supervision. Our results clearly indicate the importance of training on multiple captions per image, and of capturing syntactic (word order-based) and semantic features of these captions. We also perform an in-depth comparison of human and automatic evaluation metrics for this task, and propose strategies for collecting human judgments cheaply and on a very large scale, allowing us to augment our collection with additional relevance judgments of which captions describe which image. Our analysis shows that metrics that consider the ranked list of results for each query image or sentence are significantly more robust than metrics that are based on a single response per query. Moreover, our study suggests that the evaluation of ranking-based image description systems may be fully automated.
  @cite_13: We propose a semi-supervised model which segments and annotates images using very few labeled images and a large unaligned text corpus to relate image regions to text labels. Given photos of a sports event, all that is necessary to provide a pixel-level labeling of objects and background is a set of newspaper articles about this sport and one to five labeled images. Our model is motivated by the observation that words in text corpora share certain context and feature similarities with visual objects. We describe images using visual words, a new region-based representation. The proposed model is based on kernelized canonical correlation analysis which finds a mapping between visual and textual words by projecting them into a latent meaning space. Kernels are derived from context and adjective features inside the respective visual and textual domains. We apply our method to a challenging dataset and rely on articles of the New York Times for textual features. Our model outperforms the state-of-the-art in annotation. In segmentation it compares favorably with other methods that use significantly more labeled training data.
summary: There is a growing body of work that associates images and sentences. Some approaches focus on describing the contents of images, formulated either as a task of mapping images to a fixed set of sentences written by people @cite_27 @cite_14 , or as a task of automatically generating novel captions @cite_22 @cite_1 @cite_30 @cite_23 @cite_32 @cite_6 . More closely related to our approach are methods that naturally allow bi-drectional mapping between the two modalities. Socher and Fei-Fei @cite_13 and @cite_31 use Kernel Canonical Correlation Analysis to align images and sentences, but their method is not easily scalable since it relies on computing kernels quadratic in number of images and sentences. @cite_27 learn a common meaning space, but their method is limited to representing both images and sentences with a single triplet of (object, action, scene). @cite_35 use a Conditional Random Field to reason about complex relationships of cartoon scenes and their natural language descriptions.