Confidence-Based Simple Graph Convolutional Networks for Face Clustering

Face clustering is an effective method for taking advantage of unlabeled face data. Recent studies use graph convolutional networks (GCNs) to learn feature embeddings from the neighborhood information between face images. However, most of the face clustering methods require numerous overlapping subgraphs to characterize the local structure around the nodes, which causes significant redundancy. Moreover, the nonlinearity of the GCN itself increases the calculation complexity, which further reduces the model’s training efficiency. In this study, we propose a lightweight clustering framework, the confidence-based simple graph convolutional network (CSGCN), for face clustering, which achieves more accurate clustering results and significantly improves the efficiency of GCN-based face clustering. Specifically, CSGCN does not construct any subgraphs but convolves the entire graph as a whole and also removes the nonlinearity of the convolution in the graph convolution module, which further reduces the computational complexity. Subsequently, an effective new confidence score is constructed to better characterize the embedded features and to ensure that the subsequent clustering still maintains a high accuracy rate under the aforementioned model simplification. In addition, while most of the existing GCN-based methods are actually supervised, we construct an unsupervised confidence to make it more suitable for clustering tasks. Extensive experiments with MS-Celeb-1M, YouTube-Faces and DeepFashion datasets show that our method not only improves the clustering accuracy but also significantly reduces the execution time, whether in supervised or unsupervised models.