156 research outputs found
Neighbourhood-consensus message passing and its potentials in image processing applications
In this paper, a novel algorithm for inference in Markov Random Fields (MRFs) is presented. Its goal is to find approximate maximum a posteriori estimates in a simple manner by combining neighbourhood influence of iterated conditional modes (ICM) and message passing of loopy belief propagation (LBP). We call the proposed method neighbourhood-consensus message passing because a single joint message is sent from the specified neighbourhood to the central node. The message, as a function of beliefs, represents the agreement of all nodes within the neighbourhood regarding the labels of the central node. This way we are able to overcome the disadvantages of reference algorithms, ICM and LBP. On one hand, more information is propagated in comparison with ICM, while on the other hand, the huge amount of pairwise interactions is avoided in comparison with LBP by working with neighbourhoods. The idea is related to the previously developed iterated conditional expectations algorithm. Here we revisit it and redefine it in a message passing framework in a more general form. The results on three different benchmarks demonstrate that the proposed technique can perform well both for binary and multi-label MRFs without any limitations on the model definition. Furthermore, it manifests improved performance over related techniques either in terms of quality and/or speed
A discriminative view of MRF pre-processing algorithms
While Markov Random Fields (MRFs) are widely used in computer vision, they
present a quite challenging inference problem. MRF inference can be accelerated
by pre-processing techniques like Dead End Elimination (DEE) or QPBO-based
approaches which compute the optimal labeling of a subset of variables. These
techniques are guaranteed to never wrongly label a variable but they often
leave a large number of variables unlabeled. We address this shortcoming by
interpreting pre-processing as a classification problem, which allows us to
trade off false positives (i.e., giving a variable an incorrect label) versus
false negatives (i.e., failing to label a variable). We describe an efficient
discriminative rule that finds optimal solutions for a subset of variables. Our
technique provides both per-instance and worst-case guarantees concerning the
quality of the solution. Empirical studies were conducted over several
benchmark datasets. We obtain a speedup factor of 2 to 12 over expansion moves
without preprocessing, and on difficult non-submodular energy functions produce
slightly lower energy.Comment: ICCV 201
Efficient Semidefinite Branch-and-Cut for MAP-MRF Inference
We propose a Branch-and-Cut (B&C) method for solving general MAP-MRF
inference problems. The core of our method is a very efficient bounding
procedure, which combines scalable semidefinite programming (SDP) and a
cutting-plane method for seeking violated constraints. In order to further
speed up the computation, several strategies have been exploited, including
model reduction, warm start and removal of inactive constraints.
We analyze the performance of the proposed method under different settings,
and demonstrate that our method either outperforms or performs on par with
state-of-the-art approaches. Especially when the connectivities are dense or
when the relative magnitudes of the unary costs are low, we achieve the best
reported results. Experiments show that the proposed algorithm achieves better
approximation than the state-of-the-art methods within a variety of time
budgets on challenging non-submodular MAP-MRF inference problems.Comment: 21 page
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