Patent ID: 7796821

Claim:
A method for clustering a set of N images into P final clusters, where N and P are integers, comprising: calculating at least one similarity measure S i,j between members of each pair of images, where the similarity measure S i,j represents the similarity measure between an ith image and an jth image with i and j being image indices; calculating a total connectivity value for each of the images remaining to be clustered, where the total connectivity value for each image being defined as a sum of a function f of the similarity measures associated with that image; identifying, from among the images remaining to be clustered, a maximum total connectivity value T max corresponding to an image I max , where the image I max belonging to a current cluster which initially includes all images remaining to be clustered; removing, from the current cluster, at least one image based on at least one of its similarity measure with image I max and its total connectivity value within the current cluster; adding, to the current cluster, images having similarity measures that are greater than a first threshold; calculating, for each image within the current cluster, the total connectivity value based on those images within the current cluster; removing, from the current cluster, those images having the total connectivity value less than a second threshold; and repeating the calculating of the total connectivity value based on those images within the current cluster and the removing from the current cluster those images having the total connectivity value less than the second threshold until no further images are removed to thereby establish the current cluster as one of the final clusters.