Deep Randomly-Connected Conditional Random Fields For Image Segmentation

The use of Markov random fields (MRFs) is a common approach for performing image segmentation, where the problem is modeled using MRFs that incorporate priors on neighborhood nodes to allow for efficient Maximum a Posteriori inference. These local MRF models often result in smoothed segmentation boundaries, since they penalize the assignment of different labels to neighboring pixels and are limited in the use of long-range interactions. Although recent work on fully connected random fields and deep random fields has shown to be very promising in addressing these issues, both streams of approaches face certain limitations, which could affect inference performance and computational tractability. In this paper, we introduce the concept of deep randomly connected conditional random fields DRCRF, which fuse fully-connected random fields and deep random fields together to obtain benefits from long-range interactions while allowing for efficient inference using arbitrary potential functions. Leveraging random graph theory, the concept of stochastic cliques is incorporated into a deep CRF structure to take better advantage of long-range interactions while maintaining computational tractability. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed DRCRF framework outperforms existing fully connected CRF frameworks and provides results comparable to the principled deep random field framework, which is among the state of the art in random field frameworks for image segmentation.