@conference {Brachmann2017,
	title = {DSAC - Differentiable RANSAC for camera localization},
	booktitle = {Proceedings - 30th IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, CVPR 2017},
	volume = {2017-Janua},
	year = {2017},
	month = {nov},
	pages = {2492{\textendash}2500},
	abstract = {RANSAC is an important algorithm in robust optimization and a central building block for many computer vision applications. In recent years, traditionally hand-crafted pipelines have been replaced by deep learning pipelines, which can be trained in an end-to-end fashion. However, RANSAC has so far not been used as part of such deep learning pipelines, because its hypothesis selection procedure is non-differentiable. In this work, we present two different ways to overcome this limitation. The most promising approach is inspired by reinforcement learning, namely to replace the deterministic hypothesis selection by a probabilistic selection for which we can derive the expected loss w.r.t. to all learnable parameters. We call this approach DSAC, the differentiable counterpart of RANSAC. We apply DSAC to the problem of camera localization, where deep learning has so far failed to improve on traditional approaches. We demonstrate that by directly minimizing the expected loss of the output camera poses, robustly estimated by RANSAC, we achieve an increase in accuracy. In the future, any deep learning pipeline can use DSAC as a robust optimization component.},
	isbn = {9781538604571},
	doi = {10.1109/CVPR.2017.267},
	url = {http://arxiv.org/abs/1611.05705},
	author = {Brachmann, Eric and Krull, Alexander and Nowozin, Sebastian and Shotton, Jamie and Michel, Frank and Gumhold, Stefan and Carsten Rother}
}
@conference {Krull2017,
	title = {PoseAgent: Budget-constrained 6D object pose estimation via reinforcement learning},
	booktitle = {Proceedings - 30th IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, CVPR 2017},
	volume = {2017-Janua},
	year = {2017},
	month = {dec},
	pages = {2566{\textendash}2574},
	abstract = {State-of-the-art computer vision algorithms often achieve efficiency by making discrete choices about which hypotheses to explore next. This allows allocation of computational resources to promising candidates, however, such decisions are non-differentiable. As a result, these algorithms are hard to train in an end-to-end fashion. In this work we propose to learn an efficient algorithm for the task of 6D object pose estimation. Our system optimizes the parameters of an existing state-of-the art pose estimation system using reinforcement learning, where the pose estimation system now becomes the stochastic policy, parametrized by a CNN. Additionally, we present an efficient training algorithm that dramatically reduces computation time. We show empirically that our learned pose estimation procedure makes better use of limited resources and improves upon the state-of-the-art on a challenging dataset. Our approach enables differentiable end-to-end training of complex algorithmic pipelines and learns to make optimal use of a given computational budget.},
	isbn = {9781538604571},
	doi = {10.1109/CVPR.2017.275},
	url = {http://arxiv.org/abs/1612.03779},
	author = {Krull, Alexander and Brachmann, Eric and Nowozin, Sebastian and Michel, Frank and Shotton, Jamie and Carsten Rother}
}
@article {Kappes2015,
	title = {A Comparative Study of Modern Inference Techniques for Structured Discrete Energy Minimization Problems},
	journal = {International Journal of Computer Vision},
	volume = {115},
	number = {2},
	year = {2015},
	pages = {155{\textendash}184},
	abstract = {Szeliski et al. published an influential study in 2006 on energy minimization methods for Markov random fields. This study provided valuable insights in choosing the best optimization technique for certain classes of problems. While these insights remain generally useful today, the phenomenal success of random field models means that the kinds of inference problems that have to be solved changed significantly. Specifically, the models today often include higher order interactions, flexible connectivity structures, large label-spaces of different cardinalities, or learned energy tables. To reflect these changes, we provide a modernized and enlarged study. We present an empirical comparison of more than 27 state-of-the-art optimization techniques on a corpus of 2453 energy minimization instances from diverse applications in computer vision. To ensure reproducibility, we evaluate all methods in the OpenGM 2 framework and report extensive results regarding runtime and solution quality. Key insights from our study agree with the results of Szeliski et al. for the types of models they studied. However, on new and challenging types of models our findings disagree and suggest that polyhedral methods and integer programming solvers are competitive in terms of runtime and solution quality over a large range of model types.},
	keywords = {Benchmark, Combinatorial optimization, Discrete graphical models},
	issn = {15731405},
	doi = {10.1007/s11263-015-0809-x},
	url = {http://hci.iwr.uni-heidelberg.de/opengm2/},
	author = {Kappes, J{\"o}rg H and Bj{\"o}rn Andres and Fred A. Hamprecht and Christoph Schn{\"o}rr and Nowozin, Sebastian and Dhruv Batra and Kim, Sungwoong and Kausler, Bernhard X and Kr{\"o}ger, Thorben and Lellmann, Jan and Komodakis, Nikos and Savchynskyy, Bogdan and Carsten Rother}
}
@article {Kappes2015a,
	title = {A Comparative Study of Modern Inference Techniques for Structured Discrete Energy Minimization Problems},
	journal = {International Journal of Computer Vision},
	volume = {115},
	number = {2},
	year = {2015},
	pages = {155{\textendash}184},
	abstract = {Szeliski et al. published an influential study in 2006 on energy minimization methods for Markov random fields. This study provided valuable insights in choosing the best optimization technique for certain classes of problems. While these insights remain generally useful today, the phenomenal success of random field models means that the kinds of inference problems that have to be solved changed significantly. Specifically, the models today often include higher order interactions, flexible connectivity structures, large label-spaces of different cardinalities, or learned energy tables. To reflect these changes, we provide a modernized and enlarged study. We present an empirical comparison of more than 27 state-of-the-art optimization techniques on a corpus of 2453 energy minimization instances from diverse applications in computer vision. To ensure reproducibility, we evaluate all methods in the OpenGM 2 framework and report extensive results regarding runtime and solution quality. Key insights from our study agree with the results of Szeliski et al. for the types of models they studied. However, on new and challenging types of models our findings disagree and suggest that polyhedral methods and integer programming solvers are competitive in terms of runtime and solution quality over a large range of model types.},
	keywords = {Benchmark, Combinatorial optimization, Discrete graphical models},
	isbn = {25164671.25},
	issn = {15731405},
	doi = {10.1007/s11263-015-0809-x},
	author = {Kappes, J{\"o}rg H and Bj{\"o}rn Andres and Fred A. Hamprecht and Christoph Schn{\"o}rr and Nowozin, Sebastian and Dhruv Batra and Kim, Sungwoong and Kausler, Bernhard X and Kr{\"o}ger, Thorben and Lellmann, Jan and Komodakis, Nikos and Savchynskyy, Bogdan and Carsten Rother}
}
@article {Kappes2015b,
	title = {A Comparative Study of Modern Inference Techniques for Structured Discrete Energy Minimization Problems},
	journal = {International Journal of Computer Vision},
	volume = {115},
	number = {2},
	year = {2015},
	pages = {155{\textendash}184},
	abstract = {Szeliski et al. published an influential study in 2006 on energy minimization methods for Markov random fields. This study provided valuable insights in choosing the best optimization technique for certain classes of problems. While these insights remain generally useful today, the phenomenal success of random field models means that the kinds of inference problems that have to be solved changed significantly. Specifically, the models today often include higher order interactions, flexible connectivity structures, large label-spaces of different cardinalities, or learned energy tables. To reflect these changes, we provide a modernized and enlarged study. We present an empirical comparison of more than 27 state-of-the-art optimization techniques on a corpus of 2453 energy minimization instances from diverse applications in computer vision. To ensure reproducibility, we evaluate all methods in the OpenGM 2 framework and report extensive results regarding runtime and solution quality. Key insights from our study agree with the results of Szeliski et al. for the types of models they studied. However, on new and challenging types of models our findings disagree and suggest that polyhedral methods and integer programming solvers are competitive in terms of runtime and solution quality over a large range of model types.},
	keywords = {Benchmark, Combinatorial optimization, Discrete graphical models},
	issn = {15731405},
	doi = {10.1007/s11263-015-0809-x},
	author = {Kappes, J{\"o}rg H and Bj{\"o}rn Andres and Fred A. Hamprecht and Christoph Schn{\"o}rr and Nowozin, Sebastian and Dhruv Batra and Kim, Sungwoong and Kausler, Bernhard X and Kr{\"o}ger, Thorben and Lellmann, Jan and Komodakis, Nikos and Savchynskyy, Bogdan and Carsten Rother}
}
@conference {Schelten2015,
	title = {Interleaved regression tree field cascades for blind image deconvolution},
	booktitle = {Proceedings - 2015 IEEE Winter Conference on Applications of Computer Vision, WACV 2015},
	year = {2015},
	pages = {494{\textendash}501},
	abstract = {Image blur from camera shake is a common cause for poor image quality in digital photography, prompting a significant recent interest in image deblurring. The vast majority of work on blind deblurring splits the problem into two subsequent steps: First, the blur process (i.e., blur kernel) is estimated, then the image is restored given the estimated kernel using a non-blind deblurring algorithm. Recent work in non-blind deblurring has shown that discriminative approaches can have clear image quality and runtime benefits over typical generative formulations. In this paper, we propose a cascade for blind deblurring that alternates between kernel estimation and discriminative deblurring using regression tree fields (RTFs). We further contribute a new dataset of realistic image blur kernels from human camera shake, which we use to train the discriminative component. Extensive qualitative and quantitative experiments show a clear gain in image quality by interleaving kernel estimation and discriminative deblurring in an iterative cascade.},
	isbn = {9781479966820},
	doi = {10.1109/WACV.2015.72},
	author = {Schelten, Kevin and Nowozin, Sebastian and Jancsary, Jeremy and Carsten Rother and Roth, Stefan}
}
@article {kappes-1014-bench-arxiv,
	title = {A Comparative Study of Modern Inference Techniques for Structured Discrete Energy Minimization Problems},
	journal = {CoRR},
	volume = {abs/1404.0533},
	year = {2014},
	url = {http://hci.iwr.uni-heidelberg.de/opengm2/},
	author = {J{\"o}rg H. Kappes and Bj{\"o}rn Andres and Fred A. Hamprecht and Christoph Schn{\"o}rr and Nowozin, Sebastian and Dhruv Batra and Kim, Sungwoong and Bernhard X. Kausler and Thorben Kr{\"o}ger and Lellmann, Jan and Komodakis, Nikos and Savchynskyy, Bogdan and Carsten Rother}
}
@conference {Kappes-2013-benchmark,
	title = {A Comparative Study of Modern Inference Techniques for Discrete Energy Minimization Problem},
	booktitle = {CVPR},
	year = {2013},
	author = {J{\"o}rg H. Kappes and Bj{\"o}rn Andres and Fred A. Hamprecht and Christoph Schn{\"o}rr and Nowozin, Sebastian and Dhruv Batra and Kim, Sungwoong and Bernhard X. Kausler and Lellmann, Jan and Komodakis, Nikos and Carsten Rother}
}
@techreport {Schmidt,
	title = {Discriminative Non-blind Deblurring},
	year = {2013},
	abstract = {Non-blind deblurring is an integral component of blind approaches for removing image blur due to camera shake. Even though learning-based deblurring methods exist, they have been limited to the generative case and are compu-tationally expensive. To this date, manually-defined models are thus most widely used, though limiting the attained restoration quality. We address this gap by proposing a dis-criminative approach for non-blind deblurring. One key challenge is that the blur kernel in use at test time is not known in advance. To address this, we analyze existing approaches that use half-quadratic regularization. From this analysis, we derive a discriminative model cascade for image deblurring. Our cascade model consists of a Gaus-sian CRF at each stage, based on the recently introduced regression tree fields. We train our model by loss minimization and use synthetically generated blur kernels to generate training data. Our experiments show that the proposed approach is efficient and yields state-of-the-art restoration quality on images corrupted with synthetic and real blur.},
	author = {Schmidt, Uwe and Carsten Rother and Nowozin, Sebastian and Jancsary, Jeremy and Roth, Stefan}
}
@conference {Jancsary2013,
	title = {Learning convex QP relaxations for structured prediction},
	booktitle = {30th International Conference on Machine Learning, ICML 2013},
	number = {PART 3},
	year = {2013},
	pages = {1952{\textendash}1960},
	abstract = {We introduce a new large margin approach to discriminative training of intractable discrete graphical models. Our approach builds on a convex quadratic programming relaxation of the MAP inference problem. The model parameters are trained directly within this restricted class of energy functions so as to optimize the predictions on the training data. We address the issue of how to parameterize the resulting model and point out its relation to existing approaches. The primary motivation behind our use of the QP relaxation is its computational efficiency; yet, empirically, its predictive accuracy compares favorably to more expensive approaches. This makes it an appealing choice for many practical tasks. Copyright 2013 by the author(s).},
	author = {Jancsary, Jeremy and Nowozin, Sebastian and Carsten Rother}
}
@conference {Jancsary2012,
	title = {Loss-specific training of non-parametric image restoration models: A new state of the art},
	booktitle = {Lecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics)},
	volume = {7578 LNCS},
	number = {PART 7},
	year = {2012},
	pages = {112{\textendash}125},
	abstract = {After a decade of rapid progress in image denoising, recent methods seem to have reached a performance limit. Nonetheless, we find that state-of-the-art denoising methods are visually clearly distinguishable and possess complementary strengths and failure modes. Motivated by this observation, we introduce a powerful non-parametric image restoration framework based on Regression Tree Fields (RTF). Our restoration model is a densely-connected tractable conditional random field that leverages existing methods to produce an image-dependent, globally consistent prediction. We estimate the conditional structure and parameters of our model from training data so as to directly optimize for popular performance measures. In terms of peak signal-to-noise-ratio (PSNR), our model improves on the best published denoising method by at least 0.26dB across a range of noise levels. Our most practical variant still yields statistically significant improvements, yet is over 20x faster than the strongest competitor. Our approach is well-suited for many more image restoration and low-level vision problems, as evidenced by substantial gains in tasks such as removal of JPEG blocking artefacts. {\textcopyright} 2012 Springer-Verlag.},
	isbn = {9783642337857},
	issn = {03029743},
	doi = {10.1007/978-3-642-33786-4_9},
	author = {Jancsary, Jeremy and Nowozin, Sebastian and Carsten Rother}
}
@conference {Jancsary2012a,
	title = {Loss-specific training of non-parametric image restoration models: A new state of the art},
	booktitle = {Lecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics)},
	volume = {7578 LNCS},
	number = {PART 7},
	year = {2012},
	pages = {112{\textendash}125},
	abstract = {After a decade of rapid progress in image denoising, recent methods seem to have reached a performance limit. Nonetheless, we find that state-of-the-art denoising methods are visually clearly distinguishable and possess complementary strengths and failure modes. Motivated by this observation, we introduce a powerful non-parametric image restoration framework based on Regression Tree Fields (RTF). Our restoration model is a densely-connected tractable conditional random field that leverages existing methods to produce an image-dependent, globally consistent prediction. We estimate the conditional structure and parameters of our model from training data so as to directly optimize for popular performance measures. In terms of peak signal-to-noise-ratio (PSNR), our model improves on the best published denoising method by at least 0.26dB across a range of noise levels. Our most practical variant still yields statistically significant improvements, yet is over 20x faster than the strongest competitor. Our approach is well-suited for many more image restoration and low-level vision problems, as evidenced by substantial gains in tasks such as removal of JPEG blocking artefacts. {\textcopyright} 2012 Springer-Verlag.},
	isbn = {9783642337857},
	issn = {03029743},
	doi = {10.1007/978-3-642-33786-4_9},
	author = {Jancsary, Jeremy and Nowozin, Sebastian and Carsten Rother}
}
@conference {Jancsary2012b,
	title = {Non-parametric crfs for image labeling},
	booktitle = {NIPS Workshop Modern Nonparametric Methods in Machine Learning},
	number = {2},
	year = {2012},
	pages = {1{\textendash}5},
	abstract = {We introduce a powerful non-parametric image labeling framework, Regression Tree Fields (RTFs), and discuss its application to image restoration. The conditional structure and the parameters of our model are estimated from training data so as to directly optimize for popular performance measures, resulting in excellent predictive performance at low computational cost.},
	url = {http://www.nowozin.net/sebastian/papers/jancsary2012nonparametriccrf.pdf},
	author = {Jancsary, Jeremy and Nowozin, Sebastian and Carsten Rother}
}
@conference {Jancsary2012d,
	title = {Regression Tree Fields An efficient, non-parametric approach to image labeling problems},
	booktitle = {Proceedings of the IEEE Computer Society Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition},
	year = {2012},
	pages = {2376{\textendash}2383},
	abstract = {We introduce Regression Tree Fields (RTFs), a fully conditional random field model for image labeling problems. RTFs gain their expressive power from the use of non-parametric regression trees that specify a tractable Gaussian random field, thereby ensuring globally consistent predictions. Our approach improves on the recently introduced decision tree field (DTF) model [14] in three key ways: (i) RTFs have tractable test-time inference, making efficient optimal predictions feasible and orders of magnitude faster than for DTFs, (ii) RTFs can be applied to both discrete and continuous vector-valued labeling tasks, and (Hi) the entire model, including the structure of the regression trees and energy function parameters, can be efficiently and jointly learned from training data. We demonstrate the expressive power and flexibility of the RTF model on a wide variety of tasks, including inpainting, colorization, denoising, and joint detection and registration. We achieve excellent predictive performance which is on par with, or even surpassing, DTFs on all tasks where a comparison is possible. {\textcopyright} 2012 IEEE.},
	isbn = {9781467312264},
	issn = {10636919},
	doi = {10.1109/CVPR.2012.6247950},
	author = {Jancsary, Jeremy and Nowozin, Sebastian and Sharp, Toby and Carsten Rother}
}
@conference {Jancsary2012c,
	title = {Regression Tree Fields An efficient, non-parametric approach to image labeling problems},
	booktitle = {Proceedings of the IEEE Computer Society Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition},
	year = {2012},
	pages = {2376{\textendash}2383},
	abstract = {We introduce Regression Tree Fields (RTFs), a fully conditional random field model for image labeling problems. RTFs gain their expressive power from the use of non-parametric regression trees that specify a tractable Gaussian random field, thereby ensuring globally consistent predictions. Our approach improves on the recently introduced decision tree field (DTF) model [14] in three key ways: (i) RTFs have tractable test-time inference, making efficient optimal predictions feasible and orders of magnitude faster than for DTFs, (ii) RTFs can be applied to both discrete and continuous vector-valued labeling tasks, and (Hi) the entire model, including the structure of the regression trees and energy function parameters, can be efficiently and jointly learned from training data. We demonstrate the expressive power and flexibility of the RTF model on a wide variety of tasks, including inpainting, colorization, denoising, and joint detection and registration. We achieve excellent predictive performance which is on par with, or even surpassing, DTFs on all tasks where a comparison is possible. {\textcopyright} 2012 IEEE.},
	isbn = {9781467312264},
	issn = {10636919},
	doi = {10.1109/CVPR.2012.6247950},
	author = {Jancsary, Jeremy and Nowozin, Sebastian and Sharp, Toby and Carsten Rother}
}
@conference {Nowozin2011a,
	title = {Decision tree fields},
	booktitle = {Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision},
	year = {2011},
	pages = {1668{\textendash}1675},
	abstract = {This paper introduces a new formulation for discrete image labeling tasks, the Decision Tree Field (DTF), that combines and generalizes random forests and conditional random fields (CRF) which have been widely used in computer vision. In a typical CRF model the unary potentials are derived from sophisticated random forest or boosting based classifiers, however, the pairwise potentials are assumed to (1) have a simple parametric form with a pre-specified and fixed dependence on the image data, and (2) to be defined on the basis of a small and fixed neighborhood. In contrast, in DTF, local interactions between multiple variables are determined by means of decision trees evaluated on the image data, allowing the interactions to be adapted to the image content. This results in powerful graphical models which are able to represent complex label structure. Our key technical contribution is to show that the DTF model can be trained efficiently and jointly using a convex approximate likelihood function, enabling us to learn over a million free model parameters. We show experimentally that for applications which have a rich and complex label structure, our model achieves excellent results. {\textcopyright} 2011 IEEE.},
	isbn = {9781457711015},
	doi = {10.1109/ICCV.2011.6126429},
	author = {Nowozin, Sebastian and Carsten Rother and Bagon, Shai and Sharp, Toby and Yao, Bangpeng and Kohli, Pushmeet}
}
@conference {Pletscher2011a,
	title = {Putting MAP back on the map},
	booktitle = {Lecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics)},
	volume = {6835 LNCS},
	year = {2011},
	pages = {111{\textendash}121},
	abstract = {Conditional Random Fields (CRFs) are popular models in computer vision for solving labeling problems such as image denoising. This paper tackles the rarely addressed but important problem of learning the full form of the potential functions of pairwise CRFs. We examine two popular learning techniques, maximum likelihood estimation and maximum margin training. The main focus of the paper is on models such as pairwise CRFs, that are simplistic (misspecified) and do not fit the data well. We empirically demonstrate that for misspecified models maximum-margin training with MAP prediction is superior to maximum likelihood estimation with any other prediction method. Additionally we examine the common belief that MLE is better at producing predictions matching image statistics. {\textcopyright} 2011 Springer-Verlag.},
	isbn = {9783642231223},
	issn = {03029743},
	doi = {10.1007/978-3-642-23123-0_12},
	author = {Pletscher, Patrick and Nowozin, Sebastian and Kohli, Pushmeet and Carsten Rother}
}
@conference {Pletscher2011,
	title = {Putting MAP back on the map},
	booktitle = {Lecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics)},
	volume = {6835 LNCS},
	year = {2011},
	pages = {111{\textendash}121},
	abstract = {Conditional Random Fields (CRFs) are popular models in computer vision for solving labeling problems such as image denoising. This paper tackles the rarely addressed but important problem of learning the full form of the potential functions of pairwise CRFs. We examine two popular learning techniques, maximum likelihood estimation and maximum margin training. The main focus of the paper is on models such as pairwise CRFs, that are simplistic (misspecified) and do not fit the data well. We empirically demonstrate that for misspecified models maximum-margin training with MAP prediction is superior to maximum likelihood estimation with any other prediction method. Additionally we examine the common belief that MLE is better at producing predictions matching image statistics. {\textcopyright} 2011 Springer-Verlag.},
	isbn = {9783642231223},
	issn = {03029743},
	doi = {10.1007/978-3-642-23123-0_12},
	author = {Pletscher, Patrick and Nowozin, Sebastian and Kohli, Pushmeet and Carsten Rother}
}
@article {Nowozin2011,
	title = {Supplementary Material : Decision Tree Fields},
	journal = {Iccv},
	year = {2011},
	author = {Nowozin, Sebastian and Sharp, Toby}
}
