Evolutionary optimization with Markov random field prior

This work discusses an evolutionary algorithm in which the constituent variables of a solution are modeled by a Markov random field (MRF). We maintain a population of potential solutions at every generation and for each solution a fitness value is calculated. The evolution, however, is not achieved through genetic recombination. Instead, each variable in a solution will be updated by sampling from its probability distribution. According to the MRF prior, local exploitation is encoded in the conditional probabilities. For evolutionary exploration, we estimate the probabilities as fitness-weighted statistics. These two kinds of search are combined smoothly in our algorithm. We compare it with two representative algorithms [iterated conditional modes (ICM) and simulated annealing (SA)] on noisy and textured image segmentation. Remarkable performance is observed.