VideoCLIP: A Cross-Attention Model for Fast Video-Text Retrieval Task with Image CLIP

Video-text retrieval is an essential task in cross-modal information retrieval, i.e., retrieving relevant videos from a large and unlabelled dataset given textual queries. Existing methods that simply pool the image features (e.g., based on the CLIP encoder [14]) from frames to build the video descriptor often result in sub-optimal video-text search accuracy since the information among different modalities is not fully exchanged and aligned. In this paper, we proposed a novel dual-encoder model to address the challenging video-text retrieval problem, which uses a highly efficient cross-attention module to facilitate the information exchange between multiple modalities (i.e., video and text). The proposed VideoCLIP is evaluated on two benchmark video-text datasets, MSRVTT and DiDeMo, and the results show that our model can outperform existing state-of-the-art methods while the retrieval speed is much faster than the traditional query-agnostic search model.