A Hybrid Clustering Approach for Bag-of-Words Image Categorization

The Bag-of-Words (BoW) model is a well-known image categorization technique. However, in conventional BoW, neither the vocabulary size nor the visual words can be determined automatically. To overcome these problems, a hybrid clustering approach that combines improved hierarchical clustering with a K-means algorithm is proposed. We present a cluster validity index for the hierarchical clustering algorithm to adaptively determine when the algorithm should terminate and the optimal number of clusters. Furthermore, we improve the max-min distance method to optimize the initial cluster centers. The optimal number of clusters and initial cluster centers are fed into K-means, and finally the vocabulary size and visual words are obtained. The proposed approach is extensively evaluated on two visual datasets. The experimental results show that the proposed method outperforms the conventional BoW model in terms of categorization and demonstrate the feasibility and effectiveness of our approach.