An Expectation-Maximisation Framework for Perceptual Grouping

This paper casts the problem of perceptual grouping into an evidence combining setting using the apparatus of the EM algorithm. We are concerned with recovering a perceptual arrangement graph for line-segments using evidence provided by a raw perceptual grouping field. The perceptual grouping process is posed as one of pairwise relational clustering. The task is to assign line-segments (or other image tokens) to clusters in which there is strong relational affinity between token pairs. The parameters of our model are the cluster memberships and the pairwise affinities or link-weights for the nodes of a perceptual relation graph. Commencing from a simple probability distribution for these parameters, we show how they may be estimated using the apparatus of the EM algorithm. The new method is demonstrated on line-segment grouping problems where it is shown to outperform a non-iterative eigenclustering method.

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