Progressive Spatio-Temporal Prototype Matching for Text-Video Retrieval

The performance of text-video retrieval has been significantly improved by vision-language cross-modal learning schemes. The typical solution is to directly align the global video-level and sentence-level features during learning, which would ignore the intrinsic video-text relations, i.e., a text description only corresponds to a spatio-temporal part of videos. Hence, the matching process should consider both fine-grained spatial content and various temporal semantic events. To this end, we propose a text-video learning framework with progressive spatio-temporal prototype matching. Specifically, the matching process is decomposed into two complementary phases: object-phrase prototype matching and event-sentence prototype matching. In the object-phrase prototype matching phase, the spatial prototype generation mechanism predicts key patches or words, which are aggregated into object or phrase prototypes. Importantly, optimizing the local alignment between object-phrase prototypes helps the model perceive spatial details. In the event-sentence prototype matching phase, we design a temporal prototype generation mechanism to associate intra-frame objects and interact inter-frame temporal relations. Such progressively generated event prototypes can reveal semantic diversity in videos for dynamic matching. Validated by comprehensive experiments, our method consistently outperforms the state-of-the-art methods on four video retrieval benchmark. 1