Region Reinforcement Network With Topic Constraint for Image-Text Matching

Image and sentence matching has attracted increasing attention since it is associated with two important modalities of vision and language. Previous methods aim to find the latent correspondences between image regions and words by aggregating the similarities of the region-word pairs. However, these approaches consider little about the relationships of diverse regions in the image and treat the similarities of all region-word pairs equally. Moreover, focusing on fine-grained alignment overly, the true meaning of the original image will be likely distorted. In this paper, a novel Region Reinforcement Network with Topic Constraint (RRTC) is proposed to explore the correspondences between images and texts. Specifically, the region reinforcement network is built to infer fine-grained correspondence by considering the relationships of regions and re-assigning region-word similarities. Meanwhile, the topic constraint module is presented to summarize the central theme of images, which constrains the original image deviation. Extensive experimental results on MSCOCO and Flickr30k datasets verify the effectiveness of our proposed RRTC.