Title: A Proximity-Aware Hierarchical Clustering of Faces,
Abstract: In this paper, we propose an unsupervised face clustering algorithm called
"Proximity-Aware Hierarchical Clustering" (PAHC) that exploits the local
structure of deep representations. In the proposed method, a similarity measure
between deep features is computed by evaluating linear SVM margins. SVMs are
trained using nearest neighbors of sample data, and thus do not require any
external training data. Clusters are then formed by thresholding the similarity
scores. We evaluate the clustering performance using three challenging
unconstrained face datasets, including Celebrity in Frontal-Profile (CFP),
IARPA JANUS Benchmark A (IJB-A), and JANUS Challenge Set 3 (JANUS CS3)
datasets. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed approach can
achieve significant improvements over state-of-the-art methods. Moreover, we
also show that the proposed clustering algorithm can be applied to curate a set
of large-scale and noisy training dataset while maintaining sufficient amount
of images and their variations due to nuisance factors. The face verification
performance on JANUS CS3 improves significantly by finetuning a DCNN model with
the curated MS-Celeb-1M dataset which contains over three million face images.