Adaptive robust clustering with proximity-based merging for video-summary

To allow efficient browsing of large image collection, we have to provide a summary of its visual content. We present in this paper a new robust approach to categorize image databases: Adaptive Robust Competition with Proximity-Based Merging (ARC-M). This algorithm relies on a non-supervised database categorization, coupled with a selection of prototypes in each resulting category. Each image is represented by a high-dimensional vector in the feature space. A principal component analysis is performed for every feature to reduce dimensionality. Then, clustering is performed in challenging conditions by minimizing a Competitive Agglomeration objective function with an extra noise cluster to collect outliers. Agglomeration is improved by a merging process based on cluster proximity verification.