Supervised hierarchical Pitman-Yor process for natural scene segmentation

From conventional wisdom and empirical studies of annotated data, it has been shown that visual statistics such as object frequencies and segment sizes follow power law distributions. Previous work has shown that both kinds of power-law behavior can be captured by using a hierarchical Pitman-Yor process prior within a nonparametric Bayesian approach to scene segmentation. In this paper, we add label information into the previously unsupervised model. Our approach exploits the labelled data by adding constraints on the parameter space during the variational learning phase. We evaluate our formulation on the LabelMe natural scene dataset, and show the effectiveness of our approach.