Semi-supervised image clustering with multi-modal information

How to organize and retrieve images is now a great challenge in various domains. Image clustering is a key tool in some practical applications including image retrieval and understanding. Traditional image clustering algorithms consider a single set of features and use ad hoc distance functions, such as Euclidean distance, to measure the similarity between samples. However, multi-modal features can be extracted from images. The dimension of multi-modal data is very high. In addition, we usually have several, but not many labeled images, which lead to semi-supervised learning. In this paper, we propose a framework of image clustering based on semi-supervised distance learning and multi-modal information. First we fuse multiple features and utilize a small amount of labeled images for semi-supervised metric learning. Then we compute similarity with the Gaussian similarity function and the learned metric. Finally, we construct a semi-supervised Laplace matrix for spectral clustering and propose an effective clustering method. Extensive experiments on some image data sets show the competent performance of the proposed algorithm.