Convolutional Subspace Clustering Network with Block Diagonal Prior

Standard methods of subspace clustering are based on self-expressiveness in the original data space, which states that a data point in a subspace can be expressed as a linear combination of other points. However, the real data in raw form are usually not well aligned with the linear subspace model. Therefore, it is crucial to obtain a proper feature space for performing high quality subspace clustering. Inspired by the success of Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) for extraction powerful features from visual data and the block diagonal prior for learning a good affinity matrix from self-expression coefficients, in this paper, we propose a jointly trainable feature extraction and affinity learning framework with the block diagonal prior, termed as Convolutional Subspace Clustering Network with Block Diagonal prior (ConvSCN-BD), in which we solve the joint optimization problem in ConvSCN-BD via an alternating minimization algorithm, which updates the parameters in the convolutional modules and the self-expression coefficients with stochastic gradients descent and updates other variables with close-form solutions alternatingly. In addition, we derive the connection between the block diagonal prior and the subspace structured norm, and reveal that using the block diagonal prior on the affinity matrix is essentially incorporating the feedback information from spectral clustering. Experiments on three benchmark datasets demonstrated the effectiveness of our proposal.