Clustering of Temporal and Visual Data: Recent Advancements

Clustering plays a central role in uncovering latent structure within both temporal and visual data. It enables critical insights in various domains including healthcare, finance, surveillance, autonomous systems, and many more. With the growing volume and complexity of time-series and image-based datasets, there is an increasing demand for robust, flexible, and scalable clustering algorithms. Although these modalities differ—time-series being inherently sequential and vision data being spatial—they exhibit common challenges such as high dimensionality, noise, variability in alignment and scale, and the need for interpretable groupings. This survey presents a comprehensive review of recent advancements in clustering methods that are adaptable to both time-series and vision data. We explore a wide spectrum of approaches, including distance-based techniques (e.g., DTW, EMD), feature-based methods, model-based strategies (e.g., GMMs, HMMs), and deep learning frameworks such as autoencoders, self-supervised learning, and graph neural networks. We also survey hybrid and ensemble models, as well as semi-supervised and active clustering methods that leverage minimal supervision for improved performance. By highlighting both the shared principles and the modality-specific adaptations of clustering strategies, this work outlines current capabilities and open challenges, and suggests future directions toward unified, multimodal clustering systems.