English

On the use of human reference data for evaluating automatic image descriptions

Computation and Language 2020-06-17 v1 Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Human-Computer Interaction

Abstract

Automatic image description systems are commonly trained and evaluated using crowdsourced, human-generated image descriptions. The best-performing system is then determined using some measure of similarity to the reference data (BLEU, Meteor, CIDER, etc). Thus, both the quality of the systems as well as the quality of the evaluation depends on the quality of the descriptions. As Section 2 will show, the quality of current image description datasets is insufficient. I argue that there is a need for more detailed guidelines that take into account the needs of visually impaired users, but also the feasibility of generating suitable descriptions. With high-quality data, evaluation of image description systems could use reference descriptions, but we should also look for alternatives.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2006.08792,
  title  = {On the use of human reference data for evaluating automatic image descriptions},
  author = {Emiel van Miltenburg},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2006.08792},
  year   = {2020}
}

Comments

Originally presented as a (non-archival) poster at the VizWiz 2020 workshop, collocated with CVPR 2020. See: https://vizwiz.org/workshops/2020-workshop/

R2 v1 2026-06-23T16:21:17.879Z