Image-text matching plays a central role in bridging the semantic gap between vision and language. The key point to achieve precise visual-semantic alignment lies in capturing the fine-grained cross-modal correspondence between image and text. Most previous methods rely on single-step reasoning to discover the visual-semantic interactions, which lacks the ability of exploiting the multi-level information to locate the hierarchical fine-grained relevance. Different from them, in this work, we propose a step-wise hierarchical alignment network (SHAN) that decomposes image-text matching into multi-step cross-modal reasoning process. Specifically, we first achieve local-to-local alignment at fragment level, following by performing global-to-local and global-to-global alignment at context level sequentially. This progressive alignment strategy supplies our model with more complementary and sufficient semantic clues to understand the hierarchical correlations between image and text. The experimental results on two benchmark datasets demonstrate the superiority of our proposed method.

本文提出了一种逐步分层对齐网络 (SHAN) 的图像 - 文本匹配方法，将图像 - 文本匹配分解成多步跨模态推理过程以捕捉层次化的细粒度相关性，并在两个基准数据集上进行了实验。

基于逐层分步对齐的图像-文本匹配网络