  In recent years, cross-modal retrieval has drawn much attention due to the
rapid growth of multimodal data. It takes one type of data as the query to
retrieve relevant data of another type. For example, a user can use a text to
retrieve relevant pictures or videos. Since the query and its retrieved results
can be of different modalities, how to measure the content similarity between
different modalities of data remains a challenge. Various methods have been
proposed to deal with such a problem. In this paper, we first review a number
of representative methods for cross-modal retrieval and classify them into two
main groups: 1) real-valued representation learning, and 2) binary
representation learning. Real-valued representation learning methods aim to
learn real-valued common representations for different modalities of data. To
speed up the cross-modal retrieval, a number of binary representation learning
methods are proposed to map different modalities of data into a common Hamming
space. Then, we introduce several multimodal datasets in the community, and
show the experimental results on two commonly used multimodal datasets. The
comparison reveals the characteristic of different kinds of cross-modal
retrieval methods, which is expected to benefit both practical applications and
future research. Finally, we discuss open problems and future research
directions.
