Efficient Deep Embedded Subspace Clustering

Jinyu Cai, Jicong Fan, Wenzhong Guo, Shiping Wang, Yunhe Zhang, Zhao Zhang; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2022, pp. 1-10

Recently deep learning methods have shown significant progress in data clustering tasks. Deep clustering methods (including distance-based methods and subspace-based methods) integrate clustering and feature learning into a unified framework, where there is a mutual promotion between clustering and representation. However, deep subspace clustering methods are usually in the framework of self-expressive model and hence have quadratic time and space complexities, which prevents their applications in large-scale clustering and real-time clustering. In this paper, we propose a new mechanism for deep clustering. We aim to learn the subspace bases from deep representation in an iterative refining manner while the refined subspace bases help learning the representation of the deep neural networks in return. The proposed method is out of the self-expressive framework, scales to the sample size linearly, and is applicable to arbitrarily large datasets and online clustering scenarios. More importantly, the clustering accuracy of the proposed method is much higher than its competitors. Extensive comparison studies with state-of-the-art clustering approaches on benchmark datasets demonstrate the superiority of the proposed method.