Image classification and captioning model considering a CAM-based disagreement loss

Abstract

Image captioning has received significant interest in recent years, and notable results have been achieved. Most previous approaches have focused on generating visual descriptions from images, whereas a few approaches have exploited visual descriptions for image classification. This study demonstrates that a good performance can be achieved for both description generation and image classification through an end-to-end joint learning approach with a loss function, which encourages each task to reach a consensus. When given images and visual descriptions, the proposed model learns a multimodal intermediate embedding, which can represent both the textual and visual characteristics of an object. The performance can be improved for both tasks by sharing the multimodal embedding. Through a novel loss function based on class activation mapping, which localizes the discriminative image region of a model, we achieve a higher score when the captioning and classification model reaches a consensus on the key parts of the object. Using the proposed model, we established a substantially improved performance for each task on the UCSD Birds and Oxford Flowers datasets.