Cross-media retrieval by intra-media and inter-media correlation mining

With the rapid development of multimedia content on the Internet, cross-media retrieval has become a key problem in both research and application. Cross-media retrieval is able to retrieve the results of the same semantics with the query, but with different media types. For instance, given a query image of Moraine Lake, besides retrieving the images about Moraine Lake, cross-media retrieval system can also retrieve the related media contents of different media types such as text description. As a result, measuring content similarity between different media is a challenging problem. In this paper, we propose a novel cross-media similarity measure. It considers both intra-media and inter-media correlation, which are ignored by existing works. Intra-media correlation focuses on semantic category information within each media, while inter-media correlation focuses on positive and negative correlations between different media types. Both of them are very important and their adaptive fusion can complement each other. To mine the intra-media correlation, we propose a heterogeneous similarity measure with nearest neighbors (HSNN). The heterogeneous similarity is obtained by computing the probability for two media objects belonging to the same semantic category. To mine the inter-media correlation, we propose a cross-media correlation propagation (CMCP) approach to simultaneously deal with positive and negative correlation between media objects of different media types, while existing works focus solely on the positive correlation. Negative correlation is very important because it provides effective exclusive information. The correlations are modeled as must-link constraints and cannot-link constraints, respectively. Furthermore, our approach is able to propagate the correlation between heterogeneous modalities. Finally, both HSNN and CMCP are flexible, so that any traditional similarity measure could be incorporated. An effective ranking model is learned by further fusion of multiple similarity measures through AdaRank for cross-media retrieval. The experimental results on two datasets show the effectiveness of our proposed approach, compared with state-of-the-art methods.