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On Parameter Learning in CRF-Based Approaches to Object Class Image Segmentation

  • Sebastian Nowozin
  • Peter V. Gehler
  • Christoph H. Lampert
Conference paper
Part of the Lecture Notes in Computer Science book series (LNCS, volume 6316)

Abstract

Recent progress in per-pixel object class labeling of natural images can be attributed to the use of multiple types of image features and sound statistical learning approaches. Within the latter, Conditional Random Fields (CRF) are prominently used for their ability to represent interactions between random variables. Despite their popularity in computer vision, parameter learning for CRFs has remained difficult, popular approaches being cross-validation and piecewise training.

In this work, we propose a simple yet expressive tree-structured CRF based on a recent hierarchical image segmentation method. Our model combines and weights multiple image features within a hierarchical representation and allows simple and efficient globally-optimal learning of ≈ 105 parameters. The tractability of our model allows us to pose and answer some of the open questions regarding parameter learning applying to CRF-based approaches. The key findings for learning CRF models are, from the obvious to the surprising, i) multiple image features always help, ii) the limiting dimension with respect to current models is the amount of training data, iii) piecewise training is competitive, iv) current methods for max-margin training fail for models with many parameters.

Keywords

Image Region Conditional Random Field Factor Graph Parameter Learning Segmentation Accuracy 
These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.
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Supplementary material

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Copyright information

© Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2010

Authors and Affiliations

  • Sebastian Nowozin
    • 1
  • Peter V. Gehler
    • 2
  • Christoph H. Lampert
    • 3
  1. 1.Microsoft Research CambridgeUK
  2. 2.ETH ZurichSwitzerland
  3. 3.Institute of Science and TechnologyAustria

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