Videos contain multi-modal content, and exploring multi-branch cross-modal interactions with natural language queries can be of benefit to the text–video retrieval task (TVR). However, recent methods applying the large-scale pre-trained CLIP model for TVR only focus on visual cues in videos. Furthermore, traditional methods of simply concatenating multi-modal features do not exploit fine-grained cross-modal information in videos. In this paper, we propose a multi-branch multi-modal hybrid fusion (M2HF) network to hierarchically explore interaction between text queries and other modality content in videos. Specifically, M2HF first fuses visual features extracted by CLIP with audio and motion features extracted from videos to obtain fused audio–visual features and motion–visual features respectively. The multi-modal completion problem is also considered and solved in this process. Then, visual features, audio–visual features, motion–visual features, and text extracted from the video are used to establish cross-modal relationships with caption text queries using a multi-branch approach. The retrieval outputs from all branches are then fused to obtain the final text–video retrieval results. Our framework provides two kinds of training strategies, using an ensemble approach and an end-to-end approach. Moreover, a novel multi-modal loss function is proposed to balance the contributions of each modality for efficient end-to-end training. M2HF allows us to obtain state-of-the-art results on various benchmarks: Rank@1 of 66.0%, 68.6%, 33.9%, 57.4%, and 57.3% on MSR-VTT, MSVD, LSMDC, DiDeMo, and ActivityNet, respectively.

Recent learning-based approaches show promising performance improvement for the scene text removal task but usually leave several remnants of text and provide visually unpleasant results. In this work, a novel end-to-end framework is proposed based on accurate text stroke detection. Specifically, the text removal problem is decoupled into text stroke detection and stroke removal; we design separate networks to solve these two subproblems, the latter being a generative network. These two networks are combined as a processing unit, which is cascaded to obtain our final model for text removal. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method substantially outperforms the state-of-the-art for locating and erasing scene text. A new large-scale real-world dataset with 12,120 images has been constructed and is being made available to facilitate research, as current publicly available datasets are mainly synthetic so cannot properly measure the performance of different methods.

With the recent tremendous advances of computer graphics rendering and image editing technologies, computergenerated fake images, which in general do not reflect what happens in the reality, can now easily deceive the inspection of human visual system. In this work, we propose a convolutional neural network (CNN)-based model to distinguish computergenerated (CG) images from natural images (NIs) with channel and pixel correlation. The key component of the proposed CNN architecture is a self-coding module that takes the color images as input to extract the correlation between color channels explicitly. Unlike previous approaches that directly apply CNN to solve this problem, we consider the generality of the network (or subnetwork), i.e., the newly introduced hybrid correlation module can be directly combined with existing CNN models for enhancing the discrimination capacity of original networks. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed network outperforms state-of-the-art methods in terms of classification performance. We also show that the newly introduced hybrid correlation module can improve the classification accuracy of different CNN architectures.