A New End-to-End Image Contrastive Clustering Based on Mining Latent Positive Samples

The integration of the contrastive learning paradigm into deep clustering has led to enhanced performance in image clustering. However, in existing researches, the samples in the class of the target may be still treated as negative samples, this means that more semantic sample pairs cannot be constructed and the intra-class compactness may be compromised. In this paper, we propose a new contrastive clustering method based on mining latent positive samples (CCLPS), which utilizes the nearest neighbor relationship between samples to mine semantic positive samples in the same class. In more detail, by mining latent positive samples in both the feature and cluster spaces, CCLPS can obtain more cluster-friendly feature representation of samples to enhance clustering performance. Samples mined from the feature space fuel the cluster-level contrastive learning task, while samples mined from the cluster space fuel the instance-level task. Three image datasets CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100 and Tiny-ImageNet are employed to experimentally demonstrate usefulness and effectiveness of the proposed method in image clustering, and transfer learning based on mining latent positive samples is also discussed and comparisons are made with 19 representative clustering methods on the datasets. Experimental results indicate that the proposed method can serve as a pre-training model for transfer learning and exhibits commendable feature modeling capabilities.