Parallel and Distributed Graph Cuts by Dual Decomposition

• Graph cuts methods are at the core of many state-of-the-art algorithms in computer vision due to their efficiency in computing globally optimal solutions. In this paper, we solve the maximum flow/minimum cut problem in parallel by splitting the graph into multiple parts and hence, further increase the computational efficacy of graph cuts. Optimality of the solution is guaranteed by dual decomposition, or more specifically, the solutions to the subproblems are constrained to be equal on the overlap with dual variables. We demonstrate that our approach both allows (i) faster processing on multi-core computers and (ii) the capability to handle larger problems by splitting the graph across multiple computers on a distributed network. Even though our approach does not give a theoretical guarantee of speed-up, an extensive empirical evaluation on several applications with many different data sets consistently shows good performance. An open source C++ implementation of the dual decomposition method is also made publicly available.

Subject headings

NATURVETENSKAP  -- Data- och informationsvetenskap -- Datorseende och robotik (hsv//swe)

NATURAL SCIENCES  -- Computer and Information Sciences -- Computer Vision and Robotics (hsv//eng)

NATURVETENSKAP  -- Matematik (hsv//swe)

NATURAL SCIENCES  -- Mathematics (hsv//eng)

Keyword

mpi

supercomputer

parallel

graph cuts

Publication and Content Type

kon (subject category)

ref (subject category)