GLA: Global–Local Attention for Image Description

In recent years, the task of automatically generating image description has attracted a lot of attention in the field of artificial intelligence. Benefitting from the development of convolutional neural networks (CNNs) and recurrent neural networks (RNNs), many approaches based on the CNN-RNN framework have been proposed to solve this task and achieved remarkable process. However, two problems remain to be tackled in which the most existing methods use only the image-level representation. One problem is object missing, in which some important objects may be missing when generating the image description and the other is misprediction, when one object may be recognized in a wrong category. In this paper, to address these two problems, we propose a new method called global-local attention (GLA) for generating image description. The proposed GLA model utilizes an attention mechanism to integrate object-level features with image-level feature. Through this manner, our model can selectively pay attention to objects and context information concurrently. Therefore, our proposed GLA method can generate more relevant image description sentences and achieve the state-of-the-art performance on the well-known Microsoft COCO caption dataset with several popular evaluation metrics-CIDEr, METEOR, ROUGE-L and BLEU-1, 2, 3, 4.