Sparse Subspace Clustering: Algorithm, Theory, and Applications

作者：Ehsan Elhamifar, René Vidal · 发表于：IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence · 年份：2013 · DOI：10.1109/tpami.2013.57 · 被引用次数：3203 · 研究领域：Sparse and Compressive Sensing Techniques、Face and Expression Recognition、Remote-Sensing Image Classification

Many real-world problems deal with collections of high-dimensional data, such as images, videos, text, and web documents, DNA microarray data, and more. Often, such high-dimensional data lie close to low-dimensional structures corresponding to several classes or categories to which the data belong. In this paper, we propose and study an algorithm, called sparse subspace clustering, to cluster data points that lie in a union of low-dimensional subspaces. The key idea is that, among the infinitely many possible representations of a data point in terms of other points, a sparse representation corresponds to selecting a few points from the same subspace. This motivates solving a sparse optimization program whose solution is used in a spectral clustering framework to infer the clustering of the data into subspaces. Since solving the sparse optimization program is in general NP-hard, we consider a convex relaxation and show that, under appropriate conditions on the arrangement of the subspaces and the distribution of the data, the proposed minimization program succeeds in recovering the desired sparse representations. The proposed algorithm is efficient and can handle data points near the intersections of subspaces. Another key advantage of the proposed algorithm with respect to the state of the art is that it can deal directly with data nuisances, such as noise, sparse outlying entries, and missing entries, by incorporating the model of the data into the sparse optimization progra...