Conditional iterative decoding of Two Dimensional Hidden Markov Models

Two dimensional hidden markov models (2D-HMMs) provide substantial benefits for many computer vision and image analysis applications. Many fundamental image analysis problems, including segmentation and classification, are target applications for the 2D- HMMs. As opposed to the i.i.d. assumption of the image observations, the naturally existing spatial correlations can be readily modeled by solving the 2D-HMM decoding problem. However, computational complexity of the 2D-HMM decoding grows exponentially with the image size and is known to be NP-hard. In this paper, we present a conditional iterative decoding (CID) algorithm for the approximate decoding of 2D-HMMs. We compare the performance of the CID algorithm to the Turbo-HMM (T-HMM) decoding algorithm and show that CID gives promising results. We demonstrate the proposed algorithm on modeling spatial deformations of human faces in recognizing people across their different facial expressions.