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Deep Learning · Academic

Image Captioning System

A deep-learning model that generates natural-language descriptions of images, trained on MS-COCO.

June 2026 Completed PyTorchCNNLSTMAttention

My final-year Big Data & AI deliverable at CESI: an end-to-end image captioning pipeline.

Architecture

  • CNN encoder extracts visual features from each image.
  • LSTM decoder generates a caption word by word.
  • An attention mechanism lets the decoder focus on the relevant region of the image at each step, improving caption quality.

Training

Trained on the MS-COCO dataset, with evaluation on standard captioning metrics (BLEU).

Takeaway

Beyond the model itself, this project sharpened my understanding of the full ML lifecycle — data preparation, training, evaluation — which is increasingly relevant as AI systems fall under regulatory scrutiny (see my work on the EU AI Act).