Discrete MRF Inference of Marginal Densities for Non-uniformly Discretized Variable Space

This paper is concerned with the inference of marginal densities based on MRF models. The optimization algorithms for continuous variables are only applicable to a limited number of problems, whereas those for discrete variables are versatile. Thus, it is quite common to convert the continuous variables into discrete ones for the problems that ideally should be solved in the continuous domain, such as stereo matching and optical flow estimation. In this paper, we show a novel formulation for this continuous-discrete conversion. The key idea is to estimate the marginal densities in the continuous domain by approximating them with mixtures of rectangular densities. Based on this formulation, we derive a mean field (MF) algorithm and a belief propagation (BP) algorithm. These algorithms can correctly handle the case where the variable space is discretized in a non-uniform manner. By intentionally using such a non-uniform discretization, a higher balance between computational efficiency and accuracy of marginal density estimates could be achieved. We present a method for actually doing this, which dynamically discretizes the variable space in a coarse-to-fine manner in the course of the computation. Experimental results show the effectiveness of our approach.