Text-to-Image GAN-Based Scene Retrieval and Re-Ranking Considering Word Importance

In this paper, we propose a novel scene retrieval and re-ranking method based on a text-to-image Generative Adversarial Network (GAN). The proposed method generates an image from an input query sentence based on the text-to-image GAN and then retrieves a scene that is the most similar to the generated image. By utilizing the image generated from the input query sentence as a query, we can control semantic information of the query image at the text level. Furthermore, we introduce a novel interactive re-ranking scheme to our retrieval method. Specifically, users can consider the importance of each word within the first input query sentence. Then the proposed method re-generates the query image that reflects the word importance provided by users. By updating the generated query image based on the word importance, it becomes feasible for users to revise retrieval results through this re-ranking process. In experiments, we showed that our retrieval method including the re-ranking scheme outperforms recently proposed retrieval methods.