A novel two-stage omni-supervised face clustering algorithm

Abstract

Face clustering has applications in organizing personal photo album, video understanding and automatic labeling of data for semi-supervised learning. Many existing methods cannot cluster millions of faces. They are either too slow, inaccurate, or need a lot memory. In our paper, we proposed a two stage unsupervised clustering algorithm which can cluster millions of faces in minutes. A rough clustering using greedy Transitive Closure (TC) algorithm to separate the easy to locate clusters, then a more precise non-greedy clustering algorithm is used to split the clusters into smaller clusters. We also developed a set of omni-supervised transformations that can produce multiple embeddings using a single trained model as if there are multiple models trained. These embeddings are combined using simple averaging and normalization. We carried out extensive experiments with multiple datasets of different sizes comparing with existing state of the art clustering algorithms to show that our clustering algorithm is robust to differences between datasets, efficient and outperforms existing methods. We also carried out further analysis on number of singleton clusters and variations of our model using different non-greedy clustering algorithms. We did trained our semi-supervised model using the cluster labels and shown that our clustering algorithm is effective for semi-supervised learning.