Combining Belief Networks and Neural Networks for Scene Segmentation

  • Authors:
  • X. Feng;C. K. I. Williams;S. N. Felderhof

  • Affiliations:
  • -;-;-

  • Venue:
  • IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence
  • Year:
  • 2002

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Abstract

We are concerned with the problem of image segmentation, in which each pixel is assigned to one of a predefined finite number of labels. In Bayesian image analysis, this requires fusing together local predictions for the class labels with a prior model of label images. Following the work of, we consider the use of tree-structured belief networks (TSBNs) as prior models. The parameters in the TSBN are trained using a maximum-likelihood objective function with the EM algorithm and the resulting model is evaluated by calculating how efficiently it codes label images. A number of authors have used Gaussian mixture models to connect the label field to the image data. In this paper, we compare this approach to the scaled-likelihood method of where local predictions of pixel classification from neural networks are fused with the TSBN prior. Our results show a higher performance is obtained with the neural networks. We evaluate the classification results obtained and emphasize not only the maximum a posteriori segmentation, but also the uncertainty, as evidenced e.g., by the pixelwise posterior marginal entropies. We also investigate the use of conditional maximum-likelihood training for the TSBN and find that this gives rise to improved classification performance over the ML-trained TSBN.