Visual Analytics for Efficient Image Exploration and User-Guided Image Captioning

• Published in: IEEE transactions on visualization and computer graphics Vol. 30; no. 6; pp. 2875 - 2887
• Main Authors: Li, Yiran, Wang, Junpeng, Aboagye, Prince, Yeh, Chin-Chia Michael, Zheng, Yan, Wang, Liang, Zhang, Wei, Ma, Kwan-Liu
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: United States IEEE 01-06-2024; The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE)
• Subjects: Analytical models; Bias; data-centric AI; Datasets; Heating systems; image captioning; Image segmentation; Machine learning; pre-trained language-image models; Snow; Steering; Training; Transformers; Visual analytics
• ISSN: 1077-2626; 1941-0506; 1941-0506
• DOI: 10.1109/TVCG.2024.3388514

Recent advancements in pre-trained language-image models have ushered in a new era of visual comprehension. Leveraging the power of these models, this article tackles two issues within the realm of visual analytics: (1) the efficient exploration of large-scale image datasets and identification of data biases within them; (2) the evaluation of image captions and steering of their generation process. On the one hand, by visually examining the captions generated from language-image models for an image dataset, we gain deeper insights into the visual contents, unearthing data biases that may be entrenched within the dataset. On the other hand, by depicting the association between visual features and textual captions, we expose the weaknesses of pre-trained language-image models in their captioning capability and propose an interactive interface to steer caption generation. The two parts have been coalesced into a coordinated visual analytics system, fostering the mutual enrichment of visual and textual contents. We validate the effectiveness of the system with domain practitioners through concrete case studies with large-scale image datasets.