Efficient 3D Scene Labeling Using Fields of Trees

Olaf Kahler, Ian Reid; Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2013, pp. 3064-3071

We address the problem of 3D scene labeling in a structured learning framework. Unlike previous work which uses structured Support Vector Machines, we employ the recently described Decision Tree Field and Regression Tree Field frameworks, which learn the unary and binary terms of a Conditional Random Field from training data. We show this has significant advantages in terms of inference speed, while maintaining similar accuracy. We also demonstrate empirically the importance for overall labeling accuracy of features that make use of prior knowledge about the coarse scene layout such as the location of the ground plane. We show how this coarse layout can be estimated by our framework automatically, and that this information can be used to bootstrap improved accuracy in the detailed labeling.