Viewpoint-Agnostic Change Captioning with Cycle Consistency

Change captioning is the task of identifying the change and describing it with a concise caption. Despite recent advancements, filtering out insignificant changes still remains as a challenge. Namely, images from different camera perspectives can cause issues; a mere change in viewpoint should be disregarded while still capturing the actual changes. In order to tackle this problem, we present a new Viewpoint-Agnostic change captioning network with Cycle Consistency (VACC) that requires only one image each for the before and after scene, without depending on any other information. We achieve this by devising a new difference encoder module which can encode viewpoint information and model the difference more effectively. In addition, we propose a cycle consistency module that can potentially improve the performance of any change captioning networks in general by matching the composite feature of the generated caption and before image with the after image feature. We evaluate the performance of our proposed model across three datasets for change captioning, including a novel dataset we introduce here that contains images with changes under extreme viewpoint shifts. Through our experiments, we show the excellence of our method with respect to the CIDEr, BLEU-4, METEOR and SPICE scores. Moreover, we demonstrate that attaching our proposed cycle consistency module yields a performance boost for existing change captioning networks, even with varying image encoding mechanisms.