Graph cuts in computer vision: Difference between revisions

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As applied in the field of [[computer vision]], '''[[graph cut optimization]]''' can be employed to [[Polynomial time|efficiently]] solve a wide variety of low-level computer vision problems (''early vision''<ref>Adelson, Edward H., and James R. Bergen (1991), "[http://persci.mit.edu/pub_pdfs/elements91.pdf The plenoptic function and the elements of early vision]", Computational models of visual processing 1.2 (1991).</ref>), such as [[image smoothing]], the stereo [[correspondence problem]], [[image segmentation]], [[object co-segmentation]], and many other computer vision problems that can be formulated in terms of [[energy minimization]].
 
Many of these energy minimization problems can be approximated by solving a [[maximum flow problem]] in a [[Graph (discrete mathematics)|graph]]<ref>Boykov, Y., Veksler, O., and Zabih, R. (2001), "[httphttps://www.cs.cornell.edu/rdz/Papers/BVZ-pami01-final.pdf Fast approximate energy minimization via graph cuts]," ''IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence,'' 23(11): 1222-1239.</ref> (and thus, by the [[max-flow min-cut theorem]], define a minimal [[cut (graph theory)|cut]] of the graph).
 
Under most formulations of such problems in computer vision, the minimum energy solution corresponds to the [[Maximum a posteriori estimation|maximum a posteriori estimate]] of a solution.
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The foundational theory of [[Cut (graph theory)|graph cuts]] was first applied in [[computer vision]] in the seminal paper by Greig, Porteous and Seheult<ref name="D.M. Greig, B.T 1989">D.M. Greig, B.T. Porteous and A.H. Seheult (1989), ''[https://classes.cs.uchicago.edu/archive/2006/fall/35040-1/gps.pdf Exact maximum a posteriori estimation for binary images]'', Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, Series B, '''51''', 271–279.</ref> of [[Durham University]]. Allan Seheult and Bruce Porteous were members of Durham's lauded statistics group of the time, led by [[Julian Besag]] and [[Peter Green (statistician)|Peter Green]], with the optimisation expert [[Margaret Greig]] notable as the first ever female member of staff of the Durham Mathematical Sciences Department.
 
In the [[Bayesian statistics|Bayesian]] statistical context of smoothing noisy (or corrupted) images, they showed how the [[MAP estimate|maximum a posteriori estimate]] of a [[binary image]] can be obtained ''exactly'' by maximizing the [[Flow network|flow]] through an associated image network, involving the introduction of a ''source'' and ''sink''. The problem was therefore shown to be efficiently solvable. Prior to this result, ''approximate'' techniques such as [[simulated annealing]] (as proposed by the [[Donald Geman|Geman brothers]]),<ref>D. Geman and S. Geman (1984), ''[httphttps://www.dam.brown.edu/people/documents/stochasticrelaxation.pdf Stochastic relaxation, Gibbs distributions and the Bayesian restoration of images]'', IEEE Trans. Pattern Anal. Mach. Intell., '''6''', 721–741.</ref> or [[iterated conditional modes]] (a type of [[greedy algorithm]] suggested by [[Julian Besag]])<ref>J.E. Besag (1986), ''On the statistical analysis of dirty pictures (with discussion)'', [[Journal of the Royal Statistical Society]] Series B, '''48''', 259–302</ref> were used to solve such image smoothing problems.
 
Although the general [[Graph coloring|<math>k</math>-colour problem]] is NP hard for <math>k > 2,</math> the approach of Greig, Porteous and Seheult<ref name="D.M. Greig, B.T 1989" /> has turned out<ref>Y. Boykov, O. Veksler and R. Zabih (1998), "[httphttps://www.cs.cornell.edu/~rdz/Papers/BVZ-cvpr98.pdf Markov Random Fields with Efficient Approximations]", ''International Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR)''.</ref><ref name="boykov2001fast">Y. Boykov, O. Veksler and R. Zabih (2001), "[httphttps://www.cs.cornell.edu/~rdz/Papers/BVZ-pami01-final.pdf Fast approximate energy minimisation via graph cuts]", ''IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence'', '''29''', 1222–1239.</ref> to have wide applicability in general computer vision problems. For general problems, Greig, Porteous and Seheult's approach is often applied iteratively to sequences of related binary problems, usually yielding near optimal solutions.
 
In 2011, C. Couprie ''et al''.<ref>Camille Couprie, Leo Grady, Laurent Najman and Hugues Talbot, "[http://leogrady.net/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/couprie2011power.pdf Power Watersheds: A Unifying Graph-Based Optimization Framework]”, IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, Vol. 33, No. 7, pp. 1384-1399, July 2011</ref> proposed a general image segmentation framework, called the "Power Watershed", that minimized a real-valued [[indicator function]] from [0,1] over a graph, constrained by user seeds (or unary terms) set to 0 or 1, in which the minimization of the indicator function over the graph is optimized with respect to an exponent <math>p</math>. When <math>p=1</math>, the Power Watershed is optimized by graph cuts, when <math>p=0</math> the Power Watershed is optimized by shortest paths, <math>p=2</math> is optimized by the [[random walker algorithm]] and <math>p=\infty</math> is optimized by the [[Watershed (image processing)|watershed]] algorithm. In this way, the Power Watershed may be viewed as a generalization of graph cuts that provides a straightforward connection with other energy optimization segmentation/clustering algorithms.