Max-Margin Boltzmann Machines for Object Segmentation

We present Max-Margin Boltzmann Machines (MMBMs) for object segmentation. MMBMs are essentially a class of Conditional Boltzmann Machines that model the joint distribution of hidden variables and output labels conditioned on input observations. In addition to image-to-label connections, we build direct image-to-hidden connections to facilitate global shape prediction, and thus derive a simple Iterated Conditional Modes algorithm for efficient maximum a posteriori inference. We formulate a max-margin objective function for discriminative training, and analyze the effects of different margin functions on learning. We evaluate MMBMs using three datasets against state-of-the-art methods to demonstrate the strength of the proposed algorithms.