About `image_encoder`

[tgoncalv]

Hello, thank you for all the hard work you've done.

I got interested by your works and meticulously read the code and the paper. However, I'm still struggling to understand what the image_encoder is for, so it would be really helpful if you could give me some detailed explanations about it, and I apologise in advance if I have missed an obvious answer !

In code.lib.prepare.py we have the function:

def prepare_models(...)
    ....
    return image_encoder, ....

But actually, image_encoder seems to be never used by any modules.

Thank you !