Parameter Tuning from Pairwise Preferences

That most computer vision algorithms rely on parameters is a fact of life which cannot be avoided. For optimal algorithm performance, these parameters need to be tuned; generally speaking, this tuning is done manually or in some heuristic fashion. In this paper, we propose a new, general method for attacking the problem of parameter tuning, which is applicable to a wide variety of computer vision algorithms. Our method is semi-automatic: a user is given several pairs of outputs from a given vision algorithm, which have been generated by different parameter values; the user is then required to simply choose, for each pair, which output is preferred. Our method then finds the smoothest preference function which satisfies these user preferences. Using the theory of Reproducing Kernel Hilbert Spaces, we show how this problem can be reduced to a finite-dimensional convex optimization. We validate our parameter tuning scheme both on simulated data and on the problem of tuning the parameters of an image denoising algorithm.