MeanShift++: Extremely Fast Mode-Seeking With Applications to Segmentation and Object Tracking

Abstract: MeanShift is a popular mode-seeking clustering algorithm used in a wide range of applications in machine learning. However, it is known to be prohibitively slow, with quadratic runtime per iteration. We propose MeanShift++, an extremely fast mode-seeking algorithm based on MeanShift that uses a grid-based approach to speed up the mean shift step, replacing the computationally expensive neighbors search with a density-weighted mean of adjacent grid cells. In addition, we show that this grid-based technique for density estimation comes with theoretical guarantees. The runtime is linear in the number of points and exponential in dimension, which makes MeanShift++ ideal on low-dimensional applications such as image segmentation and object tracking. We provide extensive experimental analysis showing that MeanShift++ can be more than 10,000x faster than MeanShift with competitive clustering results on benchmark datasets and nearly identical image segmentations as MeanShift. Finally, we show promising results for object tracking.