We propose a novel agglomerative clustering method based on unmasking, a technique that was previously used for authorship verification of text documents and for abnormal event detection in videos. In order to join two clusters, we alternate between (i) training a binary classifier to distinguish between the samples from one cluster and the samples from the other cluster, and (ii) removing at each step the most discriminant features. The faster-decreasing accuracy rates of the intermediately-obtained classifiers indicate that the two clusters should be joined. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to apply unmasking in order to cluster images. We compare our method with k-means as well as a recent state-of-the-art clustering method. The empirical results indicate that our approach is able to improve performance for various (deep and shallow) feature representations and different tasks, such as handwritten digit recognition, texture classification and fine-grained object recognition.
We present a novel deep neural network architecture for unsupervised subspace clustering. This architecture is built upon deep auto-encoders, which non-linearly map the input data into a latent space. Our key idea is to introduce a novel self-expressive layer between the encoder and the decoder to mimic the "self-expressiveness" property that has proven effective in traditional subspace clustering. Being differentiable, our new self-expressive layer provides a simple but effective way to learn pairwise affinities between all data points through a standard back-propagation procedure. Being nonlinear, our neural-network based method is able to cluster data points having complex (often nonlinear) structures. We further propose pre-training and fine-tuning strategies that let us effectively learn the parameters of our subspace clustering networks. Our experiments show that the proposed method significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art unsupervised subspace clustering methods. In this paper, we propose a new image clustering algorithm, referred to as clustering using local discriminant models and global integration (LDMGI). To deal with the data points sampled from a nonlinear manifold, for each data point, we construct a local clique comprising this data point and its neighboring data points. Inspired by the Fisher criterion, we use a local discriminant model for each local clique to evaluate the clustering performance of samples within the local clique. To obtain the clustering result, we further propose a unified objective function to globally integrate the local models of all the local cliques. With the unified objective function, spectral relaxation and spectral rotation are used to obtain the binary cluster indicator matrix for all the samples. We show that LDMGI shares a similar objective function with the spectral clustering (SC) algorithms, e.g., normalized cut (NCut). In contrast to NCut in which the Laplacian matrix is directly calculated based upon a Gaussian function, a new Laplacian matrix is learnt in LDMGI by exploiting both manifold structure and local discriminant information. We also prove that K-means and discriminative K-means (DisKmeans) are both special cases of LDMGI. Extensive experiments on several benchmark image datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of LDMGI. We observe in the experiments that LDMGI is more robust to algorithmic parameter, when compared with NCut. Thus, LDMGI is more appealing for the real image clustering applications in which the ground truth is generally not available for tuning algorithmic parameters.  Clustering is a class of unsupervised learning methods that has been extensively applied and studied in computer vision. Little work has been done to adapt it to the end-to-end training of visual features on large-scale datasets. In this work, we present DeepCluster, a clustering method that jointly learns the parameters of a neural network and the cluster assignments of the resulting features. DeepCluster iteratively groups the features with a standard clustering algorithm, k-means, and uses the subsequent assignments as supervision to update the weights of the network. We apply DeepCluster to the unsupervised training of convolutional neural networks on large datasets like ImageNet and YFCC100M. The resulting model outperforms the current state of the art by a significant margin on all the standard benchmarks. Most learning approaches treat dimensionality reduction (DR) and clustering separately (i.e., sequentially), but recent research has shown that optimizing the two tasks jointly can substantially improve the performance of both. The premise behind the latter genre is that the data samples are obtained via linear transformation of latent representations that are easy to cluster; but in practice, the transformation from the latent space to the data can be more complicated. In this work, we assume that this transformation is an unknown and possibly nonlinear function. To recover the 'clustering-friendly' latent representations and to better cluster the data, we propose a joint DR and K-means clustering approach in which DR is accomplished via learning a deep neural network (DNN). The motivation is to keep the advantages of jointly optimizing the two tasks, while exploiting the deep neural network's ability to approximate any nonlinear function. This way, the proposed approach can work well for a broad class of generative models. Towards this end, we carefully design the DNN structure and the associated joint optimization criterion, and propose an effective and scalable algorithm to handle the formulated optimization problem. Experiments using different real datasets are employed to showcase the effectiveness of the proposed approach. Clustering is central to many data-driven application domains and has been studied extensively in terms of distance functions and grouping algorithms. Relatively little work has focused on learning representations for clustering. In this paper, we propose Deep Embedded Clustering (DEC), a method that simultaneously learns feature representations and cluster assignments using deep neural networks. DEC learns a mapping from the data space to a lower-dimensional feature space in which it iteratively optimizes a clustering objective. Our experimental evaluations on image and text corpora show significant improvement over state-of-the-art methods. We define a “good image cluster” as one in which images can be easily composed (like a puzzle) using pieces from each other, while are difficult to compose from images outside the cluster. The larger and more statistically significant the pieces are, the stronger the affinity between the images. This gives rise to unsupervised discovery of very challenging image categories. We further show how multiple images can be composed from each other simultaneously and efficiently using a collaborative randomized search algorithm. This collaborative process exploits the “wisdom of crowds of images”, to obtain a sparse yet meaningful set of image affinities, and in time which is almost linear in the size of the image collection. “Clustering-by-Composition” yields state-of-the-art results on current benchmark data sets. It further yields promising results on new challenging data sets, such as data sets with very few images (where a ‘cluster model’ cannot be ‘learned’ by current methods), and a subset of the PASCAL VOC data set (with huge variability in scale and appearance).