A Scientometric Visualization Analysis of Image Captioning Research From 2010 to 2020

Image captioning has gradually gained attention in the field of artificial intelligence and become an interesting and challenging task for image understanding. It needs to identify important objects in images, extract attributes, tell relationships, and help the machine generate human-like descriptions. Recent works in deep neural networks have greatly improved the performance of image caption models. However, machines are still unable to imitate the way humans think, talk and communicate, so image captioning remains an ongoing task. It is thus very important to keep up with the latest research and results in the field of image captioning whereas publications on this topic are numerous. Our work aims to help researchers to have a macro-level understanding of image captioning from four aspects: spatial-temporal distribution characteristics, collaborative networks, trends in subject research, and historical evolutionary path. We employ scientometric visualization methods to achieve this goal. The results show that China has published the largest amount of publications in image captioning, but the United States has the greatest impact on research in this area. Besides, thirteen academic groups are identified in the field of image description, with institutions such as Microsoft, Google, Australian National University, and Georgia Institute of Technology being the most prominent research institutions. Meanwhile, we find that evaluation methods, datasets, novel image captioning models based on generative adversarial networks, reinforcement learning, and Transformer, as well as remote sensing image captioning, are the new research trends. Lastly, we conclude that image captioning research has gone through three major development stages from 2010 to 2020, and on this basis, we propose a more comprehensive taxonomy of image captioning.