A Comparative Study of Pre-trained CNNs and GRU-Based Attention for Image Caption Generation

Image captioning is a challenging task involving generating a textual description for an image using computer vision and natural language processing techniques. This paper proposes a deep neural framework for image caption generation using a GRU-based attention mechanism. Our approach employs multiple pre-trained convolutional neural networks as the encoder to extract features from the image and a GRU-based language model as the decoder to generate descriptive sentences. To improve performance, we integrate the Bahdanau attention model with the GRU decoder to enable learning to focus on specific image parts. We evaluate our approach using the MSCOCO and Flickr30k datasets and show that it achieves competitive scores compared to state-of-the-art methods. Our proposed framework can bridge the gap between computer vision and natural language and can be extended to specific domains.