TDEC: Deep Embedded Image Clustering with Transformer and Distribution Information

TL;DR

TDEC introduces a novel deep clustering method combining Transformer-based feature extraction, dimensionality reduction, and distribution information to improve image clustering performance on complex datasets.

Contribution

The paper proposes TDEC, the first method to jointly consider feature representation, dimensional preference, and distribution information in deep image clustering.

Findings

TDEC achieves significantly higher clustering accuracy than recent methods.

The Transformer module learns discriminative global features effectively.

TDEC demonstrates robustness across various dataset complexities.

Abstract

Image clustering is a crucial but challenging task in multimedia machine learning. Recently the combination of clustering with deep learning has achieved promising performance against conventional methods on high-dimensional image data. Unfortunately, existing deep clustering methods (DC) often ignore the importance of information fusion with a global perception field among different image regions on clustering images, especially complex ones. Additionally, the learned features are usually clustering-unfriendly in terms of dimensionality and are based only on simple distance information for the clustering. In this regard, we propose a deep embedded image clustering TDEC, which for the first time to our knowledge, jointly considers feature representation, dimensional preference, and robust assignment for image clustering. Specifically, we introduce the Transformer to form a novel module T-Encoder to learn discriminative features with global dependency while using the Dim-Reduction block to build a friendly low-dimensional space favoring clustering. Moreover, the distribution information of embedded features is considered in the clustering process to provide reliable supervised signals for joint training. Our method is robust and allows for more flexibility in data size, the number of clusters, and the context complexity. More importantly, the clustering performance of TDEC is much higher than recent competitors. Extensive experiments with state-of-the-art approaches on complex datasets show the superiority of TDEC.