Noisy Subspace Clustering via Thresholding

We consider the problem of clustering noisy high-dimensional data points into a union of low-dimensional subspaces and a set of outliers. The number of subspaces, their dimensions, and their orientations are unknown. A probabilistic performance analysis of the thresholding-based subspace clustering (TSC) algorithm introduced recently in [1] shows that TSC succeeds in the noisy case, even when the subspaces intersect. Our results reveal an explicit tradeoff between the allowed noise level and the affinity of the subspaces. We furthermore find that the simple outlier detection scheme introduced in [1] provably succeeds in the noisy case.Comment: Presented at the IEEE Int. Symp. Inf. Theory (ISIT) 2013, Istanbul, Turkey. The version posted here corrects a minor error in the published version. Specifically, the exponent -c n_l in the success probability of Theorem 1 and in the corresponding proof outline has been corrected to -c(n_l-1

Nearness to Local Subspace Algorithm for Subspace and Motion Segmentation

There is a growing interest in computer science, engineering, and mathematics for modeling signals in terms of union of subspaces and manifolds. Subspace segmentation and clustering of high dimensional data drawn from a union of subspaces are especially important with many practical applications in computer vision, image and signal processing, communications, and information theory. This paper presents a clustering algorithm for high dimensional data that comes from a union of lower dimensional subspaces of equal and known dimensions. Such cases occur in many data clustering problems, such as motion segmentation and face recognition. The algorithm is reliable in the presence of noise, and applied to the Hopkins 155 Dataset, it generates the best results to date for motion segmentation. The two motion, three motion, and overall segmentation rates for the video sequences are 99.43%, 98.69%, and 99.24%, respectively