How to Caption Images with a Multimodal Vision Model

James Gallagher's blog post, published on July 12, 2024, provides a detailed guide on using Florence-2, a multimodal vision model developed by Microsoft Research, to generate image captions. This model, which supports both short and long captions, is capable of translating visual content into descriptive text with varying levels of detail. The post offers a step-by-step tutorial on setting up the Florence-2 model using HuggingFace Transformers and the timm image package, including installation of necessary dependencies and writing a Python script to process images. The example provided demonstrates how the model generates a detailed caption for an image of the Golden Gate Bridge. The guide highlights the model's potential applications in information retrieval systems and suggests reaching out to Roboflow’s sales and engineering teams for further integration into enterprise applications. Gallagher concludes by inviting readers to explore more about the model's architecture and capabilities through additional resources.