Moondream 2: Multimodal and Vision Analysis

Moondream 2, developed by vikhyat, is a series of "tiny vision language models" designed for multimodal tasks like visual question answering (VQA), image captioning, object detection, and calculating x-y coordinates in images. The model is available in two sizes, 2B and 0.5B, and can run on both CPUs and GPUs, though GPU support is limited in the moondream Python package. Licensed under Apache 2.0, Moondream 2 was evaluated using a qualitative set of tests, excelling in zero-shot object detection where other models often struggle, but failing in some VQA and OCR tasks. Despite its limitations, such as missing a letter in a document OCR task and hallucinating extra details in a receipt caption, Moondream 2 demonstrated strong capabilities in counting objects and reading serial numbers. The evaluation used a T4 GPU via the Hugging Face transformers package, highlighting Moondream 2's versatility and potential in various vision tasks.