Optimization techniques based on graph cuts have become a standard tool for many vision applications. These techniques allow to minimize efficiently certain energy functions corresponding to pairwise Markov Random Fields (MRFs). Currently, there is an accepted view within the computer vision community that graph cuts can only be used for optimizing a limited class of MRF energies (e.g. submodular functions). In this survey we review some results that show that graph cuts can be applied to a much larger class of energy functions (in particular, non-submodular functions). While these results are well-known in the optimization community, to our knowledge they were not used in the context of computer vision and MRF optimization. We demonstrate the relevance of these results to vision on the problem of binary texture restoration.

Learning patterns of human behavior from sensor data is extremely important for high-level activity inference. We show how to extract a person’s activities and significant places from traces of GPS data. Our system uses hierarchically structured conditional random fields to generate a consistent model of a person’s activities and places. In contrast to existing techniques, our approach takes high-level context into account in order to detect the significant places of a person. Our experiments show significant improvements over existing techniques. Furthermore, they indicate that our system is able to robustly estimate a person’s activities using a model that is trained from data collected by other persons. 1

Many state-of-the-art approaches for object recognition reduce the problem to a 0-1 classification task. Such reductions allow one to leverage sophisticated classifiers for learning. These models are typically trained independently for each class using positive and negative examples cropped from images. At test-time, various post-processing heuristics such as non-maxima suppression (NMS) are required to reconcile multiple detections within and between different classes for each image. Though crucial to good performance on benchmarks, this post-processing is usually defined heuristically. We introduce a unified model for multi-class object recognition that casts the problem as a structured prediction task. Rather than predicting a binary label for each image

Numerous real-world applications produce networked data such as web data (hypertext documents connected via hyperlinks) and communication networks (people connected via communication links). A recent focus in machine learning research has been to extend traditional machine learning classification techniques to classify nodes in such data. In this report, we attempt to provide a brief introduction to this area of research and how it has progressed during the past decade. We introduce four of the most widely used inference algorithms for classifying networked data and empirically compare them on both synthetic and real-world data. 1

Promising approaches to structured learning problems have recently been developed in the maximum margin framework. Unfortunately, algorithms that are computationally and memory efficient enough to solve large scale problems have lagged behind. We propose using simple subgradient-based techniques for optimizing a regularized risk formulation of these problems in both online and batch settings, and analyze the theoretical convergence, generalization, and robustness properties of the resulting techniques. These algorithms are are simple, memory efficient, fast to converge, and have small regret in the online setting. We also investigate a novel convex regression formulation of structured learning. Finally, we demonstrate the benefits of the subgradient approach on three structured prediction problems. 1

We propose a new method to quickly and accurately predict 3D positions of body joints from a single depth image, using no temporal information. We take an object recognition approach, designing an intermediate body parts representation that maps the difficult pose estimation problem into a simpler per-pixel classification problem. Our large and highly varied training dataset allows the classifier to estimate body parts invariant to pose, body shape, clothing, etc. Finally we generate confidence-scored 3D proposals of several body joints by reprojecting the classification result and finding local modes. The system runs at 200 frames per second on consumer hardware. Our evaluation shows high accuracy on both synthetic and real test sets, and investigates the effect of several training parameters. We achieve state of the art accuracy in our comparison with related work and demonstrate improved generalization over exact whole-skeleton nearest neighbor matching. 1.

Abstract. Many computer vision problems are naturally formulated as random fields, specifically MRFs or CRFs. The introduction of graph cuts has enabled efficient and optimal inference in associative random fields, greatly advancing applications such as segmentation, stereo reconstruction and many others. However, while fast inference is now widespread, parameter learning in random fields has remained an intractable problem. This paper shows how to apply fast inference algorithms, in particular graph cuts, to learn parameters of random fields with similar efficiency. We find optimal parameter values under standard regularized objective functions that ensure good generalization. Our algorithm enables learning of many parameters in reasonable time, and we explore further speedup techniques. We also discuss extensions to non-associative and multi-class problems. We evaluate the method on image segmentation and geometry recognition. 1

We present a simple and scalable algorithm for maximum-margin estimation of structured output models, including an important class of Markov networks and combinatorial models. We formulate the estimation problem as a convex-concave saddle-point problem that allows us to use simple projection methods based on the dual extragradient algorithm (Nesterov, 2003). The projection step can be solved using dynamic programming or combinatorial algorithms for min-cost convex flow, depending on the structure of the problem. We show that this approach provides a memory-efficient alternative to formulations based on reductions to a quadratic program (QP). We analyze the convergence of the method and present experiments on two very different structured prediction tasks: 3D image segmentation and word alignment, illustrating the favorable scaling properties of our algorithm. 1 1.

We present a simple and scalable algorithm for large-margin estimation of structured models, including an important class of Markov networks and combinatorial models. We formulate the estimation problem as a convex-concave saddle-point problem and apply the extragradient method, yielding an algorithm with linear convergence using simple gradient and projection calculations. The projection step can be solved using combinatorial algorithms for min-cost quadratic flow. This makes the approach an efficient alternative to formulations based on reductions to a quadratic program (QP). We present experiments on two very different structured prediction tasks: 3D image segmentation and word alignment, illustrating the favorable scaling properties of our algorithm. 1

In recent years, much progress has been made in outdoor autonomous navigation. However, safe navigation is still a daunting challenge in terrain containing vegetation. In this paper, we focus on the segmentation of ladar data into three classes using local three-dimensional point cloud statistics. The classes are: ”scatter ” to represent porous volumes such as grass and tree canopy, ”linear ” to capture thin objects like wires or tree branches, and finally ”surface ” to capture solid objects like ground surface, rocks or large trunks. We present the details of the proposed method, and the modifications we made to implement it on-board an autonomous ground vehicle for real-time data processing. Finally, we present results produced from different stationary laser sensors and from field tests using an unmanned ground vehicle. 1