Compressed Image Captioning using CNN-based Encoder-Decoder Framework

In today's world, image processing plays a crucial role across various fields, from scientific research to industrial applications. But one particularly exciting application is image captioning. The potential impact of effective image captioning is vast. It can significantly boost the accuracy of search engines, making it easier to find relevant information. Moreover, it can greatly enhance accessibility for visually impaired individuals, providing them with a more immersive experience of digital content. However, despite its promise, image captioning presents several challenges. One major hurdle is extracting meaningful visual information from images and transforming it into coherent language. This requires bridging the gap between the visual and linguistic domains, a task that demands sophisticated algorithms and models. Our project is focused on addressing these challenges by developing an automatic image captioning architecture that combines the strengths of convolutional neural networks (CNNs) and encoder-decoder models. The CNN model is used to extract the visual features from images, and later, with the help of the encoder-decoder framework, captions are generated. We also did a performance comparison where we delved into the realm of pre-trained CNN models, experimenting with multiple architectures to understand their performance variations. In our quest for optimization, we also explored the integration of frequency regularization techniques to compress the "AlexNet" and "EfficientNetB0" model. We aimed to see if this compressed model could maintain its effectiveness in generating image captions while being more resource-efficient.