Semi-Supervised Heterogeneous Fusion for Multimedia Data Co-Clustering

Co-clustering is a commonly used technique for tapping the rich meta-information of multimedia web documents, including category, annotation, and description, for associative discovery. However, most co-clustering methods proposed for heterogeneous data do not consider the representation problem of short and noisy text and their performance is limited by the empirical weighting of the multi-modal features. In this paper, we propose a generalized form of Heterogeneous Fusion Adaptive Resonance Theory, called GHF-ART, for co-clustering of large-scale web multimedia documents. By extending the two-channel Heterogeneous Fusion ART (HF-ART) to multiple channels, GHF-ART is designed to handle multimedia data with an arbitrarily rich level of meta-information. For handling short and noisy text, GHF-ART does not learn directly from the textual features. Instead, it identifies key tags by learning the probabilistic distribution of tag occurrences. More importantly, GHF-ART incorporates an adaptive method for effective fusion of multi-modal features, which weights the features of multiple data sources by incrementally measuring the importance of feature modalities through the intra-cluster scatters. Extensive experiments on two web image data sets and one text document set have shown that GHF-ART achieves significantly better clustering performance and is much faster than many existing state-of-the-art algorithms.