MICER: a pre-trained encoder-decoder architecture for molecular image captioning

Jia-Cai Yi, Chengkun Wu, Xiao-Chen Zhang, Xinyi Xiao, Yanlong Qiu, Wentao Zhao, Tingjun Hou, Dong-Sheng Cao

Abstract: Automatic recognition of chemical structures from molecular images provides an important avenue for the rediscovery of chemicals. Traditional rule-based approaches that rely on expert knowledge and fail to consider all the stylistic variations of molecular images usually suffer from cumbersome recognition processes and low generalization ability. Deep learning-based methods that integrate different image styles and automatically learn valuable features are flexible, but currently under-researched and have limitations, and are therefore not fully exploited.