Next-LSTM: a novel LSTM-based image captioning technique

Recently, image captioning has evolved into an immensely popular area in the field of Computer Vision. Research in this area is active and various Machine learning-based image captioning models have been proposed in the literature. It strives to generate natural language sentences in order to describe the salient parts of a given image. The main challenge with the existing approaches is effectively extracting image features to generate adequate image captions. Further, there is a need to improve the generalizability of the results on large and diverse datasets. In the current paper, a novel method, namely Next-LSTM is proposed for image captioning. It first extracts the image features using ResNeXt. It is a powerful convolution neural network based model that is adopted for the first time in the image captioning domain. Later, it applies a Long-short term memory network on the extracted features to generate accurate captions for the images. The proposed framework is then evaluated on the benchmark Flickr-8k dataset on Accuracy and BLEU Score. The performance of the proposed framework is also compared to the state-of-the-art approaches, and it outperforms the existing approaches.