With the continuous advancement in Internet technology, we are gradually stepping into an era of big data where a large amount of multimedia data is produced every day at any given time. In order to properly utilize these data, the research on big data is also constantly evolving. Cross-media retrieval is a prime example, aiming at retrieving various forms of data, for example, text, image, audio, video, and other forms. The most difficult task for cross-media retrieval lies in the potential correlation between different modalities data and how to overcome the semantic gap. This paper proposes a cross-media retrieval method based on semisupervised learning and alternate optimization (SMDCR) to overcome the abovementioned difficulties, thereby improving the retrieval accuracy. The main advantage of this method is to make full use of the degree of correlation between the semantic information of the labeled data and unlabeled data. Simultaneously, we combine the linear regression term, correlation analysis term, and feature selection term into a joint cross-media learning framework. Furthermore, the projection matrices are trained with the alternate optimization method. Finally, experimental results on two public datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.