Hierarchical Conditional Random Field for Multi-class Image Classification

Multi-class image classification has made significant advances in recent years through the combination of local and global features. This paper proposes a novel approach called hierarchical conditional random field (HCRF) that explicitly models region adjacency graph and region hierarchy graph structure of an image. This allows to set up a joint and hierarchical model of local and global discriminative methods that augments conditional random field to a multi-layer model. Region hierarchy graph is based on a multi-scale watershed