In this paper, we propose the Discriminative Multiple Canonical Correlation Analysis (DMCCA) for multimodal information analysis and fusion. DMCCA is capable of extracting more discriminative characteristics from multimodal information representations. Specifically, it finds the projected directions which simultaneously maximize the within-class correlation and minimize the between-class correlation, leading to better utilization of the multimodal information. In the process, we analytically demonstrate that the optimally projected dimension by DMCCA can be quite accurately predicted, leading to both superior performance and substantial reduction in computational cost. We further verify that Canonical Correlation Analysis (CCA), Multiple Canonical Correlation Analysis (MCCA) and Discriminative Canonical Correlation Analysis (DCCA) are special cases of DMCCA, thus establishing a unified framework for Canonical Correlation Analysis. We implement a prototype of DMCCA to demonstrate its performance in handwritten digit recognition and human emotion recognition. Extensive experiments show that DMCCA outperforms the traditional methods of serial fusion, CCA, MCCA and DCCA.
The objective of multimodal information fusion is to mathematically analyze information carried in different sources and create a new representation which will be more effectively utilized in pattern recognition and other multimedia information processing tasks. In this paper, we introduce a new method for multimodal information fusion and representation based on the Labeled Multiple Canonical Correlation Analysis (LMCCA). By incorporating class label information of the training samples,the proposed LMCCA ensures that the fused features carry discriminative characteristics of the multimodal information representations, and are capable of providing superior recognition performance. We implement a prototype of LMCCA to demonstrate its effectiveness on handwritten digit recognition,face recognition and object recognition utilizing multiple features,bimodal human emotion recognition involving information from both audio and visual domains. The generic nature of LMCCA allows it to take as input features extracted by any means,including those by deep learning (DL) methods. Experimental results show that the proposed method enhanced the performance of both statistical machine learning (SML) methods, and methods based on DL.