6,668 research outputs found
Large-scale Binary Quadratic Optimization Using Semidefinite Relaxation and Applications
In computer vision, many problems such as image segmentation, pixel
labelling, and scene parsing can be formulated as binary quadratic programs
(BQPs). For submodular problems, cuts based methods can be employed to
efficiently solve large-scale problems. However, general nonsubmodular problems
are significantly more challenging to solve. Finding a solution when the
problem is of large size to be of practical interest, however, typically
requires relaxation. Two standard relaxation methods are widely used for
solving general BQPs--spectral methods and semidefinite programming (SDP), each
with their own advantages and disadvantages. Spectral relaxation is simple and
easy to implement, but its bound is loose. Semidefinite relaxation has a
tighter bound, but its computational complexity is high, especially for large
scale problems. In this work, we present a new SDP formulation for BQPs, with
two desirable properties. First, it has a similar relaxation bound to
conventional SDP formulations. Second, compared with conventional SDP methods,
the new SDP formulation leads to a significantly more efficient and scalable
dual optimization approach, which has the same degree of complexity as spectral
methods. We then propose two solvers, namely, quasi-Newton and smoothing Newton
methods, for the dual problem. Both of them are significantly more efficiently
than standard interior-point methods. In practice, the smoothing Newton solver
is faster than the quasi-Newton solver for dense or medium-sized problems,
while the quasi-Newton solver is preferable for large sparse/structured
problems. Our experiments on a few computer vision applications including
clustering, image segmentation, co-segmentation and registration show the
potential of our SDP formulation for solving large-scale BQPs.Comment: Fixed some typos. 18 pages. Accepted to IEEE Transactions on Pattern
Analysis and Machine Intelligenc
Efficient SDP Inference for Fully-connected CRFs Based on Low-rank Decomposition
Conditional Random Fields (CRF) have been widely used in a variety of
computer vision tasks. Conventional CRFs typically define edges on neighboring
image pixels, resulting in a sparse graph such that efficient inference can be
performed. However, these CRFs fail to model long-range contextual
relationships. Fully-connected CRFs have thus been proposed. While there are
efficient approximate inference methods for such CRFs, usually they are
sensitive to initialization and make strong assumptions. In this work, we
develop an efficient, yet general algorithm for inference on fully-connected
CRFs. The algorithm is based on a scalable SDP algorithm and the low- rank
approximation of the similarity/kernel matrix. The core of the proposed
algorithm is a tailored quasi-Newton method that takes advantage of the
low-rank matrix approximation when solving the specialized SDP dual problem.
Experiments demonstrate that our method can be applied on fully-connected CRFs
that cannot be solved previously, such as pixel-level image co-segmentation.Comment: 15 pages. A conference version of this work appears in Proc. IEEE
Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, 201
Efficient Relaxations for Dense CRFs with Sparse Higher Order Potentials
Dense conditional random fields (CRFs) have become a popular framework for
modelling several problems in computer vision such as stereo correspondence and
multi-class semantic segmentation. By modelling long-range interactions, dense
CRFs provide a labelling that captures finer detail than their sparse
counterparts. Currently, the state-of-the-art algorithm performs mean-field
inference using a filter-based method but fails to provide a strong theoretical
guarantee on the quality of the solution. A question naturally arises as to
whether it is possible to obtain a maximum a posteriori (MAP) estimate of a
dense CRF using a principled method. Within this paper, we show that this is
indeed possible. We will show that, by using a filter-based method, continuous
relaxations of the MAP problem can be optimised efficiently using
state-of-the-art algorithms. Specifically, we will solve a quadratic
programming (QP) relaxation using the Frank-Wolfe algorithm and a linear
programming (LP) relaxation by developing a proximal minimisation framework. By
exploiting labelling consistency in the higher-order potentials and utilising
the filter-based method, we are able to formulate the above algorithms such
that each iteration has a complexity linear in the number of classes and random
variables. The presented algorithms can be applied to any labelling problem
using a dense CRF with sparse higher-order potentials. In this paper, we use
semantic segmentation as an example application as it demonstrates the ability
of the algorithm to scale to dense CRFs with large dimensions. We perform
experiments on the Pascal dataset to indicate that the presented algorithms are
able to attain lower energies than the mean-field inference method
Discrete-Continuous ADMM for Transductive Inference in Higher-Order MRFs
This paper introduces a novel algorithm for transductive inference in
higher-order MRFs, where the unary energies are parameterized by a variable
classifier. The considered task is posed as a joint optimization problem in the
continuous classifier parameters and the discrete label variables. In contrast
to prior approaches such as convex relaxations, we propose an advantageous
decoupling of the objective function into discrete and continuous subproblems
and a novel, efficient optimization method related to ADMM. This approach
preserves integrality of the discrete label variables and guarantees global
convergence to a critical point. We demonstrate the advantages of our approach
in several experiments including video object segmentation on the DAVIS data
set and interactive image segmentation
A Compact Linear Programming Relaxation for Binary Sub-modular MRF
We propose a novel compact linear programming (LP) relaxation for binary
sub-modular MRF in the context of object segmentation. Our model is obtained by
linearizing an -norm derived from the quadratic programming (QP) form of
the MRF energy. The resultant LP model contains significantly fewer variables
and constraints compared to the conventional LP relaxation of the MRF energy.
In addition, unlike QP which can produce ambiguous labels, our model can be
viewed as a quasi-total-variation minimization problem, and it can therefore
preserve the discontinuities in the labels. We further establish a relaxation
bound between our LP model and the conventional LP model. In the experiments,
we demonstrate our method for the task of interactive object segmentation. Our
LP model outperforms QP when converting the continuous labels to binary labels
using different threshold values on the entire Oxford interactive segmentation
dataset. The computational complexity of our LP is of the same order as that of
the QP, and it is significantly lower than the conventional LP relaxation
Complexity of Discrete Energy Minimization Problems
Discrete energy minimization is widely-used in computer vision and machine
learning for problems such as MAP inference in graphical models. The problem,
in general, is notoriously intractable, and finding the global optimal solution
is known to be NP-hard. However, is it possible to approximate this problem
with a reasonable ratio bound on the solution quality in polynomial time? We
show in this paper that the answer is no. Specifically, we show that general
energy minimization, even in the 2-label pairwise case, and planar energy
minimization with three or more labels are exp-APX-complete. This finding rules
out the existence of any approximation algorithm with a sub-exponential
approximation ratio in the input size for these two problems, including
constant factor approximations. Moreover, we collect and review the
computational complexity of several subclass problems and arrange them on a
complexity scale consisting of three major complexity classes -- PO, APX, and
exp-APX, corresponding to problems that are solvable, approximable, and
inapproximable in polynomial time. Problems in the first two complexity classes
can serve as alternative tractable formulations to the inapproximable ones.
This paper can help vision researchers to select an appropriate model for an
application or guide them in designing new algorithms.Comment: ECCV'16 accepte
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