Scale-Driven Tensor Representation-Based Multiview Clustering

Real-world data tends to exhibit an inherent hierarchical structure, providing a natural multiview perspective where features at different scales can be treated as distinct views. However, most existing multiview clustering algorithms primarily focus on the inter-sample relationships at a single level. These methods overlook the hierarchical structures present in the data and are specifically designed for native multiview data. This article introduces a comprehensive multiview clustering framework that transforms both typical data and images into a unified multiview feature representation. The framework allows for extracting multiscale features from the raw data and clustering different types of data with the same algorithm. A novel scale-driven pre-processing approach unifies the feature structure across various data types and explores local relationships among samples at multiple scales. Features at larger scales delineate the global cluster contours, while features at smaller scales reveal fine-grained local details. Subsequently, the proposed method learns the view-specific partitions from different scales of views and derives consensus features through tensor low-rank representation. By optimizing these consensus features, the approach effectively captures the precise cluster shapes from coarse to fine-grained levels. The final label indicator matrix is directly obtained from these consensus features. To demonstrate the effectiveness and versatility of the proposed method, we conducted experimental comparisons with state-of-the-art (SOTA) algorithms in both multiview clustering and image segmentation across diverse datasets. The source code and datasets are released at https://github.com/ChuanbinZhang/SDTR.