1 Introduction to Markov Random Fields

This book sets out to demonstrate the power of the Markov random field (MRF) in vision. It treats the MRF both as a tool for modeling image data and, coupled with a set of recently developed algorithms, as a means of making inferences about images. The inferences concern underlying image and scene structure to solve problems such as image reconstruction, image segmentation, 3D vision, and object labeling. This chapter is designed to present some of the main concepts used in MRFs, both as a taster and as a gateway to the more detailed chapters that follow, as well as a stand-alone introduction to MRFs. The unifying ideas in using MRFs for vision are the following: