  In subspace clustering, a group of data points belonging to a union of
subspaces are assigned membership to their respective subspaces. This paper
presents a new approach dubbed Innovation Pursuit (iPursuit) to the problem of
subspace clustering using a new geometrical idea whereby subspaces are
identified based on their relative novelties. We present two frameworks in
which the idea of innovation pursuit is used to distinguish the subspaces.
Underlying the first framework is an iterative method that finds the subspaces
consecutively by solving a series of simple linear optimization problems, each
searching for a direction of innovation in the span of the data potentially
orthogonal to all subspaces except for the one to be identified in one step of
the algorithm. A detailed mathematical analysis is provided establishing
sufficient conditions for iPursuit to correctly cluster the data. The proposed
approach can provably yield exact clustering even when the subspaces have
significant intersections. It is shown that the complexity of the iterative
approach scales only linearly in the number of data points and subspaces, and
quadratically in the dimension of the subspaces. The second framework
integrates iPursuit with spectral clustering to yield a new variant of
spectral-clustering-based algorithms. The numerical simulations with both real
and synthetic data demonstrate that iPursuit can often outperform the
state-of-the-art subspace clustering algorithms, more so for subspaces with
significant intersections, and that it significantly improves the
state-of-the-art result for subspace-segmentation-based face clustering.
