An End-to-End, Multi-Branch, Feature Fusion-Comparison Deep Clustering Method

The application of contrastive learning in image clustering in the field of unsupervised learning has attracted much attention due to its ability to effectively improve clustering performance. Extracting features for face-oriented clustering using deep learning networks has also become one of the key challenges in this field. Some current research focuses on learning valuable semantic features using contrastive learning strategies to accomplish cluster allocation in the feature space. However, some studies decoupled the two phases of feature extraction and clustering are prone to error transfer, on the other hand, features learned in the feature extraction phase of multi-stage training are not guaranteed to be suitable for the clustering task. To address these challenges, We propose an end-to-end multi-branch feature fusion comparison deep clustering method (SwEAC), which incorporates a multi-branch feature extraction strategy in the representation learning phase, this method completes the clustering center comparison between multiple views and then assigns clusters to the extracted features. In order to extract higher-level semantic features, a multi-branch structure is used to learn multi-dimensional spatial channel dimension information and weighted receptive-field spatial features, achieving cross-dimensional information exchange of multi-branch sub-features. Meanwhile, we jointly optimize unsupervised contrastive representation learning and clustering in an end-to-end architecture to obtain semantic features for clustering that are more suitable for clustering tasks. Experimental results show that our model achieves good clustering performance on three popular image datasets evaluated by three unsupervised evaluation metrics, which proves the effectiveness of end-to-end multi-branch feature fusion comparison deep clustering methods.