Playing with Duality: An Overview of Recent Primal-Dual Approaches for Solving Large-Scale Optimization Problems

Optimization methods are at the core of many problems in signal/image processing, computer vision, and machine learning. For a long time, it has been recognized that looking at the dual of an optimization problem may drastically simplify its solution. Deriving efficient strategies which jointly brings into play the primal and the dual problems is however a more recent idea which has generated many important new contributions in the last years. These novel developments are grounded on recent advances in convex analysis, discrete optimization, parallel processing, and non-smooth optimization with emphasis on sparsity issues. In this paper, we aim at presenting the principles of primal-dual approaches, while giving an overview of numerical methods which have been proposed in different contexts. We show the benefits which can be drawn from primal-dual algorithms both for solving large-scale convex optimization problems and discrete ones, and we provide various application examples to illustrate their usefulness

Geometric Multi-Model Fitting with a Convex Relaxation Algorithm

We propose a novel method to fit and segment multi-structural data via convex relaxation. Unlike greedy methods --which maximise the number of inliers-- this approach efficiently searches for a soft assignment of points to models by minimising the energy of the overall classification. Our approach is similar to state-of-the-art energy minimisation techniques which use a global energy. However, we deal with the scaling factor (as the number of models increases) of the original combinatorial problem by relaxing the solution. This relaxation brings two advantages: first, by operating in the continuous domain we can parallelize the calculations. Second, it allows for the use of different metrics which results in a more general formulation. We demonstrate the versatility of our technique on two different problems of estimating structure from images: plane extraction from RGB-D data and homography estimation from pairs of images. In both cases, we report accurate results on publicly available datasets, in most of the cases outperforming the state-of-the-art

A primal Barvinok algorithm based on irrational decompositions

We introduce variants of Barvinok's algorithm for counting lattice points in polyhedra. The new algorithms are based on irrational signed decomposition in the primal space and the construction of rational generating functions for cones with low index. We give computational results that show that the new algorithms are faster than the existing algorithms by a large factor.Comment: v3: New all-primal algorithm. v4: Extended introduction, updated computational results. To appear in SIAM Journal on Discrete Mathematic

Distributed and Parallel Algorithms for Set Cover Problems with Small Neighborhood Covers

In this paper, we study a class of set cover problems that satisfy a special property which we call the {\em small neighborhood cover} property. This class encompasses several well-studied problems including vertex cover, interval cover, bag interval cover and tree cover. We design unified distributed and parallel algorithms that can handle any set cover problem falling under the above framework and yield constant factor approximations. These algorithms run in polylogarithmic communication rounds in the distributed setting and are in NC, in the parallel setting.Comment: Full version of FSTTCS'13 pape

Generating Second Order (Co)homological Information within AT-Model Context

In this paper we design a new family of relations between (co)homology classes, working with coefficients in a field and starting from an AT-model (Algebraic Topological Model) AT(C) of a finite cell complex C These relations are induced by elementary relations of type “to be in the (co)boundary of” between cells. This high-order connectivity information is embedded into a graph-based representation model, called Second Order AT-Region-Incidence Graph (or AT-RIG) of C. This graph, having as nodes the different homology classes of C, is in turn, computed from two generalized abstract cell complexes, called primal and dual AT-segmentations of C. The respective cells of these two complexes are connected regions (set of cells) of the original cell complex C, which are specified by the integral operator of AT(C). In this work in progress, we successfully use this model (a) in experiments for discriminating topologically different 3D digital objects, having the same Euler characteristic and (b) in designing a parallel algorithm for computing potentially significant (co)homological information of 3D digital objects.Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad MTM2016-81030-PMinisterio de Economía y Competitividad TEC2012-37868-C04-0