Progressive Positive Association Framework for Image and Text Retrieval

With the increasing amount of multimedia data, the demand for fast and accurate access to information is growing. Image and text retrieval learns visual and textual semantic relationships for multimedia data management and content recognition. The main challenge of this task is how to derive image and text similarity based on local associations under huge modal gap. However, the existing methods compute semantic relevance using associations of all fragments (visual regions and textual words), which underestimate the uncertainty of associations and discriminative positive associations leading to cross-modal correspondence ambiguity. To address these issues, we propose a novel Progressive Positive Association Framework (PPAF), which models association uncertainty as a normal distribution and progressively mines direct and potential positive associations according to the characteristics of the association distribution. We design positive association matching, which adaptively fuses multi-step associations for local matching depending on the relevance difference. In addition, we apply KL loss constraint on cross-modal association distribution in order to enhance local semantic alignment. Extended experiments demonstrate the leading performance of PPAF.