Papers › Image Captioning with Deep Bidirectional LSTMs

Image Captioning with Deep Bidirectional LSTMs

4 Apr 2016arXiv:1604.00790archive 2025-07-28

Cheng Wang, Haojin Yang, Christian Bartz, Christoph Meinel

This work presents an end-to-end trainable deep bidirectional LSTM (Long-Short Term Memory) model for image captioning. Our model builds on a deep convolutional neural network (CNN) and two separate LSTM networks. It is capable of learning long term visual-language interactions by making use of history and future context information at high level semantic space. Two novel deep bidirectional variant models, in which we increase the depth of nonlinearity transition in different way, are proposed to learn hierarchical visual-language embeddings. Data augmentation techniques such as multi-crop, multi-scale and vertical mirror are proposed to prevent overfitting in training deep models. We visualize the evolution of bidirectional LSTM internal states over time and qualitatively analyze how our models "translate" image to sentence. Our proposed models are evaluated on caption generation and image-sentence retrieval tasks with three benchmark datasets: Flickr8K, Flickr30K and MSCOCO datasets. We demonstrate that bidirectional LSTM models achieve highly competitive performance to the state-of-the-art results on caption generation even without integrating additional mechanism (e.g. object detection, attention model etc.) and significantly outperform recent methods on retrieval task.

PaperPDFCode

In Syntology Open this paper in Syntology's Atlas, the map of the papers in Syntology's graph and their citations.

Code

deepsemantic/image_captioning officialmentioned in papermentioned on GitHub report

Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.

Code Syntology ran Syntology

Not run by Syntology. Nothing on this page verifies that the listed code works.

Tasks

Caption GenerationData AugmentationImage CaptioningObject DetectionRetrievalSentenceSentence Retrievalobject-detection

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

No leaderboard rows for this paper in the archive.

Methods

LSTMSigmoid ActivationTanh Activation

Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections