Deep Comprehensive Correlation Mining for Image Clustering

Jianlong Wu, Keyu Long, Fei Wang, Chen Qian, Cheng Li, Zhouchen Lin, Hongbin Zha; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2019, pp. 8150-8159

Recent developed deep unsupervised methods allow us to jointly learn representation and cluster unlabelled data. These deep clustering methods %like DAC start with mainly focus on the correlation among samples, e.g., selecting high precision pairs to gradually tune the feature representation, which neglects other useful correlations. In this paper, we propose a novel clustering framework, named deep comprehensive correlation mining (DCCM), for exploring and taking full advantage of various kinds of correlations behind the unlabeled data from three aspects: 1) Instead of only using pair-wise information, pseudo-label supervision is proposed to investigate category information and learn discriminative features. 2) The features' robustness to image transformation of input space is fully explored, which benefits the network learning and significantly improves the performance. 3) The triplet mutual information among features is presented for clustering problem to lift the recently discovered instance-level deep mutual information to a triplet-level formation, which further helps to learn more discriminative features. Extensive experiments on several challenging datasets show that our method achieves good performance, e.g., attaining 62.3% clustering accuracy on CIFAR-10, which is 10.1% higher than the state-of-the-art results.