@inproceedings{ahsan-etal-2021-multi,
    title = "Multi-Modal Image Captioning for the Visually Impaired",
    author = "Ahsan, Hiba  and
      Bhatt, Daivat  and
      Shah, Kaivan  and
      Bhalla, Nikita",
    editor = "Durmus, Esin  and
      Gupta, Vivek  and
      Liu, Nelson  and
      Peng, Nanyun  and
      Su, Yu",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 2021 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Student Research Workshop",
    month = jun,
    year = "2021",
    address = "Online",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest_wac_2008/2021.naacl-srw.8/",
    doi = "10.18653/v1/2021.naacl-srw.8",
    pages = "53--60",
    abstract = "One of the ways blind people understand their surroundings is by clicking images and relying on descriptions generated by image-captioning systems. Current work on captioning images for the visually impaired do not use the textual data present in the image when generating captions. This problem is critical as many visual scenes contain text, and 21{\%} of the questions asked by blind people about the images they click pertain to the text present in them. In this work, we propose altering AoANet, a state-of-the-art image-captioning system, to leverage text detected in the image as an input feature. In addition, we use a pointer-generator network to copy detected text to the caption when tokens need to be reproduced accurately. Our model outperforms AoANet on the benchmark dataset VizWiz, giving a 35{\%} and 16.2{\%} performance improvement on CIDEr and SPICE scores, respectively."
}