A cross-modal conditional mechanism based on attention for text-video retrieval

Current research in cross-modal retrieval has primarily focused on aligning the global features of videos and sentences. However, video conveys a much more comprehensive range of information than text. Thus, text-video matching should focus on the similarities between frames containing critical information and text semantics. This paper proposes a cross-modal conditional feature aggregation model based on the attention mechanism. It includes two innovative modules: (1) A cross-modal attentional feature aggregation module, which uses the semantic text features as conditional projections to extract the most relevant features from the video frames. It aggregates these frame features to form global video features. (2) A global-local similarity calculation module calculates similarities at two granularities (video-sentence and frame-word features) to consider both the topic and detail features in the text-video matching process. Our experiments on the four widely used MSR-VTT, LSMDC, MSVD and DiDeMo datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our model and its superiority over state-of-the-art methods. The results show that the cross-modal attention aggregation approach can effectively capture the primary semantic information of the video. At the same time, the global-local similarity calculation model can accurately match text and video based on topic and detail features.