Robust Subspace Clustering with Block Diagonal Representation for Noisy Image Datasets

As a relatively advanced method, the subspace clustering algorithm by block diagonal representation (BDR) will be competent in performing subspace clustering on a dataset if the dataset is assumed to be noise-free and drawn from the union of independent linear subspaces. Unfortunately, this assumption is far from reality, since the real data are usually corrupted by various noises and the subspaces of data overlap with each other, the performance of linear subspace clustering algorithms, including BDR, degrades on the real complex data. To solve this problem, we design a new objective function based on BDR, in which l(2,1) norm of the reconstruction error is introduced to model the noises and improve the robustness of the algorithm. After optimizing the objective function, we present the corresponding subspace clustering algorithm to pursue a self-expressive coefficient matrix with a block diagonal structure for a noisy dataset. An affinity matrix is constructed based on the coefficient matrix, and then fed to the spectral clustering algorithm to obtain the final clustering results. Experiments on several artificial noisy image datasets show that the proposed algorithm has robustness and better clustering performance than the compared algorithms.