In this paper, we address the subspace clustering problem. Given a set of data samples (vectors) approximately drawn from a union of multiple subspaces, our goal is to cluster the samples into their respective subspaces and remove possible outliers as well. To this end, we propose a novel objective function named Low-Rank Representation (LRR), which seeks the lowest rank representation among all the candidates that can represent the data samples as linear combinations of the bases in a given dictionary. It is shown that the convex program associated with LRR solves the subspace clustering problem in the following sense: When the data is clean, we prove that LRR exactly recovers the true subspace structures; when the data are contaminated by outliers, we prove that under certain conditions LRR can exactly recover the row space of the original data and detect the outlier as well; for data corrupted by arbitrary sparse errors, LRR can also approximately recover the row space with theoretical guarantees. Since the subspace membership is provably determined by the row space, these further imply that LRR can perform robust subspace clustering and error correction in an efficient and effective way.
Recently many scientific and engineering applications have involved the challenging task of analyzing large amounts of unsorted high-dimensional data that have very complicated structures. From both geometric and statistical points of view, such unsorted data are considered mixed as different parts of the data have significantly different structures which cannot be described by a single model. In this paper we propose to use subspace arrangements—a union of multiple subspaces—for modeling mixed data: each subspace in the arrangement is used to model just a homogeneous subset of the data. Thus, multiple subspaces together can capture the heterogeneous structures within the data set. In this paper, we give a comprehensive introduction to a new approach for the estimation of subspace arrangements. This is known as generalized principal component analysis (GPCA). In particular, we provide a comprehensive summary of important algebraic properties and statistical facts that are crucial for making the inference of subspace arrangements both efficient and robust, even when the given data are corrupted by noise or contaminated with outliers. This new method in many ways improves and generalizes extant methods for modeling or clustering mixed data. There have been successful applications of this new method to many real-world problems in computer vision, image processing, and system identification. In this paper, we will examine several of those representative applications. This paper is intended to be expository in nature. However, in order that this may serve as a more complete reference for both theoreticians and practitioners, we take the liberty of filling in several gaps between the theory and the practice in the existing literature. This paper studies segmentation of multiple rigid-body motions in a 3-D dynamic scene under perspective camera projection. We consider dynamic scenes that contain both 3-D rigid-body structures and 2-D planar structures. Based on the well-known epipolar and homography constraints between two views, we propose a hybrid perspective constraint (HPC) to unify the representation of rigid-body and planar motions. Given a mixture of K hybrid perspective constraints, we propose an algebraic process to partition image correspondences to the individual 3-D motions, called Robust Algebraic Segmentation (RAS). Particularly, we prove that the joint distribution of image correspondences is uniquely determined by a set of (2K)-th degree polynomials, a global signature for the union of K motions of possibly mixed type. The first and second derivatives of these polynomials provide a means to recover the association of the individual image samples to their respective motions. Finally, using robust statistics, we show that the polynomials can be robustly estimated in the presence of moderate image noise and outliers. We conduct extensive simulations and real experiments to validate the performance of the new algorithm. The results demonstrate that RAS achieves notably higher accuracy than most existing robust motion-segmentation methods, including random sample consensus (RANSAC) and its variations. The implementation of the algorithm is also two to three times faster than the existing methods. The implementation of the algorithm and the benchmark scripts are available at http: perception.csl.illinois.edu ras .