Discrete-Continuous ADMM for Transductive Inference in Higher-Order MRFs

Emanuel Laude, Jan-Hendrik Lange, Jonas Schüpfer, Csaba Domokos, Laura Leal-Taixé, Frank R. Schmidt, Bjoern Andres, Daniel Cremers; Proceedings of the IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2018, pp. 1614-1624

This paper introduces a novel algorithm for transductive inference in higher-order MRFs, where the unary energies are parameterized by a variable classifier. The considered task is posed as a joint optimization problem in the continuous classifier parameters and the discrete label variables. In contrast to prior approaches such as convex relaxations, we propose an advantageous decoupling of the objective function into discrete and continuous subproblems and a novel, efficient optimization method related to ADMM. This approach preserves integrality of the discrete label variables and guarantees global convergence to a critical point. We demonstrate the advantages of our approach in several experiments including video object segmentation on the DAVIS data set and interactive image segmentation.