Scalable Multi-view Subspace Clustering with Unified Anchors

Multi-view subspace clustering has received widespread attention to effectively fuse multi-view information among multimedia applications. Considering that most existing approaches' cubic time complexity makes it challenging to apply to realistic large-scale scenarios, some researchers have addressed this challenge by sampling anchor points to capture distributions in different views. However, the separation of the heuristic sampling and clustering process leads to weak discriminate anchor points. Moreover, the complementary multi-view information has not been well utilized since the graphs are constructed independently by the anchors from the corresponding views. To address these issues, we propose a Scalable Multi-view Subspace Clustering with Unified Anchors (SMVSC). To be specific, we combine anchor learning and graph construction into a unified optimization framework. Therefore, the learned anchors can represent the actual latent data distribution more accurately, leading to a more discriminative clustering structure. Most importantly, the linear time complexity of our proposed algorithm allows the multi-view subspace clustering approach to be applied to large-scale data. Then, we design a four-step alternative optimization algorithm with proven convergence. Compared with state-of-the-art multi-view subspace clustering methods and large-scale oriented methods, the experimental results on several datasets demonstrate that our SMVSC method achieves comparable or better clustering performance much more efficiently. The code of SMVSC is available at https://github.com/Jeaninezpp/SMVSC.