SAMT-generator: A second-attention for image captioning based on multi-stage transformer network

In recent years, Transformer has been widely used in the crossing task of computer vision (CV) and natural language processing (NLP), e.g., image captioning. The prior works of image captioning based on Transformer have achieved remarkable progress. In order to further improve the model’s ability to describe detail features and generate high-quality sentences, in the paper, we first construct a Multi-stage Transformer Feature Enhancement Network (MT-FEN), which obtains more semantics by fusing features at different scales. Furthermore, we crucially propose a novel second-attention (SA) that can focus more on valuable features and filter out noises in MT-FEN. Besides that, to generate more sensible sentences, we use multiple decoding layers to choose the best-described word via the Max-out module. The overall model is dubbed as SAMT-Generator. After conducting extensive experiments on two well-known datasets: MS COCO and Flickr8k, the results demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed model, and it is comparable with SOTA methods.