MAP estimation of semi-metric MRFs via hierarchical graph cuts

  • Authors:
  • M. Pawan Kumar;Daphne Koller

  • Affiliations:
  • Stanford University;Stanford University

  • Venue:
  • UAI '09 Proceedings of the Twenty-Fifth Conference on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence
  • Year:
  • 2009

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Abstract

We consider the task of obtaining the maximum a posteriori estimate of discrete pairwise random fields with arbitrary unary potentials and semi-metric pairwise potentials. For this problem, we propose an accurate hierarchical move making strategy where each move is computed efficiently by solving an st-MINCUT problem. Unlike previous move making approaches, e.g. the widely used α-expansion algorithm, our method obtains the guarantees of the standard linear programming (LP) relaxation for the important special case of metric labeling. Unlike the existing LP relaxation solvers, e.g. interior-point algorithms or tree-reweighted message passing, our method is significantly faster as it uses only the efficient st-MINCUT algorithm in its design. Using both synthetic and real data experiments, we show that our technique outperforms several commonly used algorithms.