Highly-Economized Multi-View Binary Compression for Scalable Image Clustering

Zheng Zhang, Li Liu, Jie Qin, Fan Zhu, Fumin Shen, Yong Xu, Ling Shao, Heng Tao Shen; The European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2018, pp. 717-732

How to economically cluster large-scale multi-view images is a long-standing problem in computer vision. To tackle this challenge, this paper introduces a novel approach named Highly-economized Scalable Image Clustering (HSIC) that radically surpasses conventional image clustering methods via binary compression. We intuitively unify the binary representation learning and efficient binary cluster structure learning into a joint framework. In particular, common binary representations are learned by exploiting both sharable and individual information across multiple views in order to capture their underlying correlations. Meanwhile, cluster assignment with robust binary centroids is also performed via effective discrete optimization under L21-norm constraint. By this means, heavy continuous-valued Euclidean distance computations can be successfully reduced by efficient binary XOR operations during the clustering procedure. To our best knowledge, HSIC is the first binary clustering work specifically designed for scalable multi-view image clustering. Extensive experimental results on four large-scale image datasets show that HSIC consistently outperforms the state-of-the-art approaches, whilst significantly reducing computational time and memory footprint.