README.md

Image Captioning Project

Description

The project aims to build a machine learning application that produces captions to accurately describe images.

Requirements

• Docker
• Docker Compose

Installation

$ git clone ...
$ cd project_root_directory
$ docker-compose build
$ docker-compose up

After the installation the following urls are available:

• http://localhost:3000 - Application Frontend
• http://localhost:4000 - Jupyter Lab
• http://localhost:5000 - MLflow

Project Architecture

The project includes the following services:

• Flask: web server
• Celery: handles asynchronous tasks
• Redis: provides a data store and a message broker for Celery
• MLflow: tracks ML model training runs, stores model artifacts
• Jupyter: used for training ML models

ML Model

Training Dataset

The training dataset consists of vecrotized images from MSCOCO and text descriptions for the images.

Loss Function

• Cross Entropy

How to train a new model

• Go to Jupyter Lab url (the link is above), open train.ipynb from the project's root directory.
• Run the entire notebook, at the end of it the trained model will be saved as an artifact in MLflow.
• Restart all project services. The application will pick up the last trained model and use it for generating new captions.