Arabic Captioning for Images of Clothing Using Deep Learning

Sensors (Basel). 2023 Apr 7;23(8):3783. doi: 10.3390/s23083783.

Abstract

Fashion is one of the many fields of application that image captioning is being used in. For e-commerce websites holding tens of thousands of images of clothing, automated item descriptions are quite desirable. This paper addresses captioning images of clothing in the Arabic language using deep learning. Image captioning systems are based on Computer Vision and Natural Language Processing techniques because visual and textual understanding is needed for these systems. Many approaches have been proposed to build such systems. The most widely used methods are deep learning methods which use the image model to analyze the visual content of the image, and the language model to generate the caption. Generating the caption in the English language using deep learning algorithms received great attention from many researchers in their research, but there is still a gap in generating the caption in the Arabic language because public datasets are often not available in the Arabic language. In this work, we created an Arabic dataset for captioning images of clothing which we named "ArabicFashionData" because this model is the first model for captioning images of clothing in the Arabic language. Moreover, we classified the attributes of the images of clothing and used them as inputs to the decoder of our image captioning model to enhance Arabic caption quality. In addition, we used the attention mechanism. Our approach achieved a BLEU-1 score of 88.52. The experiment findings are encouraging and suggest that, with a bigger dataset, the attributes-based image captioning model can achieve excellent results for Arabic image captioning.

Keywords: deep learning; image attributes; image captioning; transfer learning.

Grants and funding

This research received no external funding.