Meaningful Clustered Forest: an Automatic and Robust Clustering Algorithm

Tepper, Mariano; Musé, Pablo; Almansa, Andrés

by Mariano Tepper, Pablo Musé, Andrés Almansa

Abstract:

We propose a new clustering technique that can be regarded as a numerical method to compute the proximity gestalt. The method analyzes edge length statistics in the MST of the dataset and provides an a contrario cluster detection criterion. The approach is fully parametric on the chosen distance and can detect arbitrarily shaped clusters. The method is also automatic, in the sense that only a single parameter is left to the user. This parameter has an intuitive interpretation as it controls the expected number of false detections. We show that the iterative application of our method can (1) provide robustness to noise and (2) solve a masking phenomenon in which a highly populated and salient cluster dominates the scene and inhibits the detection of less-populated, but still salient, clusters.

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Reference:

Meaningful Clustered Forest: an Automatic and Robust Clustering Algorithm (Mariano Tepper, Pablo Musé, Andrés Almansa), Technical report, , 2011.

Bibtex Entry:

@techreport{Tepper2011a,
	Abstract = {We propose a new clustering technique that can be regarded as a numerical method to compute the proximity gestalt. The method analyzes edge length statistics in the MST of the dataset and provides an a contrario cluster detection criterion. The approach is fully parametric on the chosen distance and can detect arbitrarily shaped clusters. The method is also automatic, in the sense that only a single parameter is left to the user. This parameter has an intuitive interpretation as it controls the expected number of false detections. We show that the iterative application of our method can (1) provide robustness to noise and (2) solve a masking phenomenon in which a highly populated and salient cluster dominates the scene and inhibits the detection of less-populated, but still salient, clusters.},
	Archiveprefix = {arXiv},
	Arxivid = {1104.0651},
	Author = {Tepper, Mariano and Mus{\'{e}}, Pablo and Almansa, Andr{\'{e}}s},
	Eprint = {1104.0651},
	Month = {apr},
	Title = {{Meaningful Clustered Forest: an Automatic and Robust Clustering Algorithm}},
	Url = {http://arxiv.org/abs/1104.0651},
	Year = {2011},
	Bdsk-Url-1 = {http://arxiv.org/abs/1104.0651}}