Patent ID: 7460717

Claim:
A method for clustering a set of N images into P final clusters, where N and P are integers, the method comprising: (a) calculating at least one similarity measure S i,j between members of each pair of images, wherein S i,j represents the similarity measure between an ith image and an jth image with i and j being image indices and S i,j =S j,i ; (b) calculating a total connectivity value for each of the images remaining to be clustered, a total connectivity value for each image being defined as a sum of a function f of the similarity measures associated with that image; (c) identifying, from among said images remaining to be clustered, a maximum total connectivity value T max corresponding to an image I max , image I max belonging to a current cluster C which initially includes all images remaining to be clustered; (d) removing, from the current cluster C, at least one image based on at least one of its similarity measure with image I max and its total connectivity value within current cluster C; (e) adding, to the current cluster C, images having a similarity measure that is greater than a threshold T 3 with any image currently in cluster C; (f) calculating, for each image within the current cluster C, a total connectivity value based on those images within C; (g) removing, from the current cluster C, those images having a total connectivity value less than a threshold T 4 ; (h) repeating said steps (f) and (g) until no further images are removed to thereby establish the current cluster C as one of the final clusters; (i) removing all images in the current cluster C from further consideration; and (j) repeating steps (b)-(i) until all N images are assigned to a final cluster.