Inferring 3D objects and the layout of indoor scenes from a single RGB-D image captured with a Kinect camera is a challenging task. Towards this goal, we propose a high-order graphical model and jointly reason about the layout, objects and superpixels in the image. In contrast to existing holistic approaches, our model leverages detailed 3D geometry using inverse graphics and explicitly enforces occlusion and visibility constraints for respecting scene properties and projective geometry. We cast the task as MAP inference in a factor graph and solve it efficiently using message passing. We evaluate our method with respect to several baselines on the challenging NYUv2 indoor dataset using 21 object categories. Our experiments demonstrate that the proposed method is able to infer scenes with a large degree of clutter and occlusions.

Most object tracking methods only exploit a single quantization of an image space: pixels, superpixels, or bounding boxes, each of which has advantages and disadvantages. It is highly unlikely that a common optimal quantization level, suitable for tracking all objects in all environments, exists. We therefore propose a hierarchical appearance representation model for tracking, based on a graphical model that exploits shared information across multiple quantization levels. The tracker aims to find the most possible position of the target by jointly classifying the pixels and superpixels and obtaining the best configuration across all levels. The motion of the bounding box is taken into consideration, while Online Random Forests are used to provide pixel- and superpixel-level quantizations and progressively updated on-the-fly. By appropriately considering the multilevel quantizations, our tracker exhibits not only excellent performance in non-rigid object deformation handling, but also its robustness to occlusions. A quantitative evaluation is conducted on two benchmark datasets: a non-rigid object tracking dataset (11 sequences) and the CVPR2013 tracking benchmark (50 sequences). Experimental results show that our tracker overcomes various tracking challenges and is superior to a number of other popular tracking methods.

In this paper, we present a comprehensive survey of Markov Random Fields (MRFs) in computer vision and image understanding, with respect to the modeling, the inference and the learning. While MRFs were introduced into the computer vision field about two decades ago, they started to become a ubiquitous tool for solving visual perception problems around the turn of the millennium following the emergence of efficient inference methods. During the past decade, a variety of MRF models as well as inference and learning methods have been developed for addressing numerous low, mid and high-level vision problems. While most of the literature concerns pairwise MRFs, in recent years we have also witnessed significant progress in higher-order MRFs, which substantially enhances the expressiveness of graph-based models and expands the domain of solvable problems. This survey provides a compact and informative summary of the major literature in this research topic.