CWATR: Generating Richer Captions with Object Attributes

Image captioning is a popular yet challenging task which is at the intersection of Computer Vision and Natural Language Processing. Recently, transformer-based unified Vision and Language models advanced the state-of-the-art further on image captioning. However, there are still fundamental problems in these models. Even though the generated captions by these models are grammatically correct and describe the input image fairly good, they might overlook important details in the image. In this paper, we demonstrate these problems in a state-of-the-art baseline image captioning method and analyze the reasoning behind these problems. We propose a novel approach, named CWATR (Captioning With ATtRibutes), to integrate object attributes to the generated captions in order to obtain richer and more detailed captions. Our analyses demonstrate that the proposed approach generates richer and more visually grounded captions by integrating attributes of the objects in the scene to the generated captions successfully.