Beyond pairwise energies: Efficient optimization for higher-order MRFs

In this paper, we introduce a higher-order MRF optimization framework. On the one hand, it is very general; we thus use it to derive a generic optimizer that can be applied to almost any higher-order MRF and that provably optimizes a dual relaxation related to the input MRF problem. On the other hand, it is also extremely flexible and thus can be easily adapted to yield far more powerful algorithms when dealing with subclasses of high-order MRFs. We thus introduce a new powerful class of high-order potentials, which are shown to offer enough expressive power and to be useful for many vision tasks. To address them, we derive, based on the same framework, a novel and extremely efficient message-passing algorithm, which goes beyond the aforementioned generic optimizer and is able to deliver almost optimal solutions of very high quality. Experimental results on vision problems demonstrate the extreme effectiveness of our approach. For instance, we show that in some cases we are even able to compute the global optimum for NP-hard higher-order MRFs in a very efficient manner.