A multi-modal attentive framework that can interpret text (MMAT)

Abstract

Deep learning algorithms have demonstrated exceptional performance on various computer vision and natural language processing tasks. However, for machines to learn information signals, they must understand and have enough reasoning power to respond to general questions based on the linguistic features present in images. Questions such as “What temperature is my oven set to?” need the models to understand objects in the images visually and then spatially identify the text associated with them. The existing Visual Question Answering model fails to recognize linguistic features present in the images, which is crucial for assisting the visually impaired. This paper aims to deal with the task of a visual question answering system that can do reasoning with text, optical character recognition (OCR), and visual modalities. The proposed Visual Question Answering model focuses on the image’s most relevant part by using an attention mechanism and passing all the features to the fusion encoder after getting pairwise attention, where the model is inclined toward the OCR-Linguistic features. The proposed model uses the dynamic pointer network instead of classification for iterative answer prediction with a focal loss function to overcome the class imbalance problem. On the TextVQA dataset, the proposed model obtains an accuracy of 46.8% and an average of 55.21% on the STVQA dataset. The results indicate the effectiveness of the proposed approach and suggest a Multi-Modal Attentive Framework that can learn individual text, object, and OCR features and then predict answers based on the text in the image.