Boosting web video categorization with contextual information from social web

Web video categorization is a fundamental task for web video search. In this paper, we explore web video categorization from a new perspective, by integrating the model-based and data-driven approaches to boost the performance. The boosting comes from two aspects: one is the performance improvement for text classifiers through query expansion from related videos and user videos. The model-based classifiers are built based on the text features extracted from title and tags. Related videos and user videos act as external resources for compensating the shortcoming of the limited and noisy text features. Query expansion is adopted to reinforce the classification performance of text features through related videos and user videos. The other improvement is derived from the integration of model-based classification and data-driven majority voting from related videos and user videos. From the data-driven viewpoint, related videos and user videos are treated as sources for majority voting from the perspective of video relevance and user interest, respectively. Semantic meaning from text, video relevance from related videos, and user interest induced from user videos, are combined to robustly determine the video category. Their combination from semantics, relevance and interest further improves the performance of web video categorization. Experiments on YouTube videos demonstrate the significant improvement of the proposed approach compared to the traditional text based classifiers. © 2011 Springer Science+Business Media, LLC.