Markov random fields with efficient approximations

Markov Random Fields (MRFs) can be used for a wide variety of vision problems. In this paper we focus on MRFs with two-valued clique potentials, which form a generalized Potts model. We show that the maximum a posteriori estimate of such an MRF can be obtained by solving a multiway minimum cut problem on a graph. We develop efficient algorithms for computing good approximations to the minimum multiway, cut. The visual correspondence problem can be formulated as an MRF in our framework; this yields quite promising results on real data with ground truth. We also apply our techniques to MRFs with linear clique potentials.