X-GACMN: An X-Shaped Generative Adversarial Cross-Modal Network with Hypersphere Embedding

Abstract

How to bridge heterogeneous gap between different modalities is one of the main challenges in cross-modal retrieval task. Most existing methods try to tackle this problem by projecting data from different modalities into a common space. In this paper, we introduce a novel X-Shaped Generative Adversarial Cross-Modal Network (X-GACMN) to learn a better common space between different modalities. Specifically, the proposed architecture combines the process of synthetic data generation and distribution adapting into a unified framework to make sure the heterogeneous modality distributions similar to each other in the learned common subspace. To promote the discriminative ability, a new loss function that combines intra-modality angular softmax loss and cross-modality pair-wise consistent loss is further imposed on the common space, hence the learned features can well preserve both inter-modality structure and intra-modality structure on a hypersphere manifold. Extensive experiments on three benchmark datasets show the effectiveness of the proposed approach.