Dynamic Clustering Convolutional Neural Network

Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have been playing a dominant role in computer vision. However, the existing approaches of using local window modeling in popular CNNs lack flexibility and hinder their ability to capture long-range dependencies of objects in an image. To overcome these limitations, we propose a novel CNN architecture, termed Dynamic Clustering Convolutional Neural Network (DCCNeXt). The proposed DCCNeXt takes a unique approach by employing global clustering to group image patches with similar semantics into clusters that are then convolved using the shared convolution kernels. To address the high computational complexity of global clustering, the feature vectors from each patch's subspace are extracted for efficient clustering, which makes the proposed model widely compatible with the downstream vision tasks. The extensive experiments of image classification, object detection, instance segmentation, and semantic segmentation on the benchmark datasets demonstrate that the proposed DCCNeXt outperforms the mainstream Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), Vision Transformers (ViTs), Vision Multi-layer Perceptrons (MLPs), Vision Graph Neural Networks (GNNs), and Vision Mambas (ViMs). We anticipate that this study will provide a new perspective and a promising avenue for the design of convolutional neural networks.