Similarity Preserving Transformer Cross-Modal Hashing for Video-Text Retrieval

As social networks grow exponentially, there is an increasing demand for video retrieval using natural language. Cross-modal hashing that encodes multi-modal data using compact hash code has been widely used in large-scale image-text retrieval, primarily due to its computation and storage efficiency. When applied to video-text retrieval, existing unsupervised cross-modal hashing extracts the frame- or word-level features individually, and thus ignores long-term dependencies. In addition, effectively exploiting the multi-modal structure is a remarkable challenge owing to the complex nature of video and text. To address the above issues, we propose Similarity Preserving Transformer Cross-Modal Hashing (SPTCH), a new unsupervised deep cross-modal hashing method for video-text retrieval. SPTCH encodes video and text by bidirectional transformer encoder that exploits their long-term dependencies. SPTCH constructs a multi-modal collaborative graph to model correlations among multi-modal data, and applies semantic aggregation by employing Graph Convolutional Network (GCN) on such graph. SPTCH designs unsupervised multi-modal contrastive loss and neighborhood reconstruction loss to effectively leverage inter- and intra-modal similarity structure among videos and texts. The empirical results on three video benchmark datasets illustrate that the proposed SPTCH generally outperforms state-of-the-arts in video-text retrieval.