facepalm I just realized I was talking about this in the context of MNIST -- my apologies.
It would be better in a problem with horizontal symmetry like CIFAR, esp if the zipping is serialized by unwinding the 2d pixel array into 1d.
One trick that _should_ work is by comparing the distances of starting the compression at the 4 different corners of the image, in the 2 separate directions for each corner. That should provide way more than enough information for k-means clustering.
My apologies again for my mistake, thank you for asking, I wouldn't have really seen that otherwise :')))).
Why would it improve the result so much? Sounds very interesting so I'm curious.