Epitome Representation of Images and Notes on Epitome-based Silhouette Generation

Describing the appearance of images is a task common to many computer vision applications. A novel appearance and shape model called epitomes was recently reported and seems to draw some attention in academia. Epitomes are condensed miniatures of images composed of an arrangement of patches from the original image. The result is a compact representation of the textural and shape essence of an image. This arrangement of patches is found using a variant of the EM algorithm called “variational EM”. The epitome was introduced in the context of generative image models and structuring the image as various constitutive elements layers. The purpose of this paper is to describe in some detail epitome construction, the use of variational EM and Bayesian networks in epitome estimation and a layered generative models of images using epitomes. The intended audience of this paper is the student who is interested in epitomic image representation and has some knowledge of the EM algorithm and graphical models.