Automated Image Captioning with Multi-layer Gated Recurrent Unit

Describing the semantic content of an image via natural language, known as image captioning, has recently attracted substantial interest in computer vision and language processing communities. Current image captioning approaches are mainly based on an encoder-decoder framework in which visual information is extracted by an image encoder and captions are generated by a text decoder, using convolution neural networks (CNN) and recurrent neural networks (RNN), respectively. Although this framework is promising for image captioning, it has limitations in utilizing the encoded visual information for generating grammatically and semantically correct captions in the RNN decoder. More specifically, the RNN decoder is ineffective in using the contextual information from the encoded data due to its limited ability in capturing long-term complex dependencies. Inspired by the advantage of gated recurrent unit (GRU), in this paper, we propose an extension of conventional RNN by introducing a multi-layer GRU that modulates the most relevant information inside the unit to enhance the semantic coherence of captions. Experimental results on the MSCOCO dataset show the superiority of our proposed approach over the state-of-the-art approaches in several performance metrics.