  We propose a symmetric low-rank representation (SLRR) method for subspace
clustering, which assumes that a data set is approximately drawn from the union
of multiple subspaces. The proposed technique can reveal the membership of
multiple subspaces through the self-expressiveness property of the data. In
particular, the SLRR method considers a collaborative representation combined
with low-rank matrix recovery techniques as a low-rank representation to learn
a symmetric low-rank representation, which preserves the subspace structures of
high-dimensional data. In contrast to performing iterative singular value
decomposition in some existing low-rank representation based algorithms, the
symmetric low-rank representation in the SLRR method can be calculated as a
closed form solution by solving the symmetric low-rank optimization problem. By
making use of the angular information of the principal directions of the
symmetric low-rank representation, an affinity graph matrix is constructed for
spectral clustering. Extensive experimental results show that it outperforms
state-of-the-art subspace clustering algorithms.
