Robust Face Clustering Via Tensor Decomposition

Face clustering is a key component either in image managements or video analysis. Wild human faces vary with the poses, expressions, and illumination changes. All kinds of noises, like block occlusions, random pixel corruptions, and various disguises may also destroy the consistency of faces referring to the same person. This motivates us to develop a robust face clustering algorithm that is less sensitive to these noises. To retain the underlying structured information within facial images, we use tensors to represent faces, and then accomplish the clustering task based on the tensor data. The proposed algorithm is called robust tensor clustering (RTC), which firstly finds a lower-rank approximation of the original tensor data using a L1 norm optimization function. Because L1 norm does not exaggerate the effect of noises compared with L2 norm, the minimization of the L1 norm approximation function makes RTC robust. Then, we compute high-order singular value decomposition of this approximate tensor to obtain the final clustering results. Different from traditional algorithms solving the approximation function with a greedy strategy, we utilize a nongreedy strategy to obtain a better solution. Experiments conducted on the benchmark facial datasets and gait sequences demonstrate that RTC has better performance than the state-of-the-art clustering algorithms and is more robust to noises.