Deep Relation Embedding for Cross-Modal Retrieval

Cross-modal retrieval aims to identify relevant data across different modalities. In this work, we are dedicated to cross-modal retrieval between images and text sentences, which is formulated into similarity measurement for each image-text pair. To this end, we propose a Cross-modal Relation Guided Network (CRGN) to embed image and text into a latent feature space. The CRGN model uses GRU to extract text feature and ResNet model to learn the globally guided image feature. Based on the global feature guiding and sentence generation learning, the relation between image regions can be modeled. The final image embedding is generated by a relation embedding module with an attention mechanism. With the image embeddings and text embeddings, we conduct cross-modal retrieval based on the cosine similarity. The learned embedding space well captures the inherent relevance between image and text. We evaluate our approach with extensive experiments on two public benchmark datasets, i.e., MS-COCO and Flickr30K. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach achieves better or comparable performance with the state-of-the-art methods with notable efficiency.