Structured local predictors for image labelling

In this paper we introduce Structured Local Predictors (SLP) A new formulation that considers the image labelling problem from a structured learning point of view. SLP are locally operating models, which provide a per-pixel labelling by exploiting contextual relations, learned from complex interactions between labels and a customizable intermediate representation of the image data. Our first key contribution is to handle flexible configurations of pairwise interactions between image pixels while allowing them to be made arbitrarily dependent on the image data. Moreover, we pose the parameter learning process as a convex, structured-learning problem, which can be efficiently solved in a globally optimal way due to the introduction of a continuous, structured output space. Finally, we provide an interface to our model by means of a quantization space, allowing to define task-specific intermediate representations for the input data. In our experiments we demonstrate the broad applicability of our model for tasks like inpainting and semantic labelling. © 2012 IEEE.