Learning random field models for computer vision

Random fields are among the most popular models in computer vision due to their ability to model statistical interdependence between individual variables. Three key issues in the application of random fields to a given problem are (i) defining appropriate graph structures that represent the underlying task, (ii) finding suitable functions over the graph that encode certain preferences, and (iii) performing inference efficiently on the resulting model to obtain a solution. While a large body of recent research has been devoted to the last issue, this thesis will focus on the first two.We first study them in the context of three well-known low-level vision problems, namely image denoising, stereo vision, and optical flow, and demonstrate the benefit of using more appropriate graph structures and learning more suitable potential functions. Moreover we extend our study to landmark classification, a problem in the high-level vision domain where random field models have rarely been used. We show that higher classification accuracy can be achieved by considering multiple images jointly as a random field instead of regarding them as separate entities.