Nonconvex submodule clustering via joint sliced sparse gradient and cluster-aware approach

Abstract

Most existing subspace clustering methods preprocess image data by converting them into vectors, which lacks exploration of the spatial structure of high-dimensional data. Therefore, we proposes a nonconvex submodule clustering model (NSSGCA) via joint sliced sparse gradient and cluster-aware approach. NSSGCA arranges each 2D image as lateral slices of a 3rd-order tensor, and utilizes the t-product under the model of the union of free submodules to represent 3rd-order tensor samples, thereby exploring the latent spatial structure of samples. To more accurately approximate tensor rank, a nonconvex Schatten p-norm constraint is imposed on the rotated representation tensor. Under the submodule framework, a consistent gradient matrix is derived based on the δ-nearest neighbor adjacency graph to construct sliced sparse gradient (SSG) regularization, which is more conducive to clustering tasks. NSSGCA learns representation tensor with clearer block-like structure based on ℓq norm and cluster-aware attention mechanism. The convergence of the constructed sequence to the stationary Karush–Kuhn–Tucker (KKT) point is proven. Experimental results on real-world image datasets confirm the effectiveness of NSSGCA.