We propose a novel spatially continuous framework for convex relaxations
based on functional lifting. Our method can be interpreted as a
sublabel-accurate solution to multilabel problems. We show that previously
proposed functional lifting methods optimize an energy which is linear between
two labels and hence require (often infinitely) many labels for a faithful
approximation. In contrast, the proposed formulation is based on a piecewise
convex approximation and therefore needs far fewer labels. In comparison to
recent MRF-based approaches, our method is formulated in a spatially continuous
setting and shows less grid bias. Moreover, in a local sense, our formulation
is the tightest possible convex relaxation. It is easy to implement and allows
an efficient primal-dual optimization on GPUs. We show the effectiveness of our
approach on several computer vision problems