Seven years ago, Szeliski et al. published an influential study on energy minimization methods for Markov random fields (MRF). This study provided valuable insights in choosing the best optimization technique for certain classes of problems. While these insights remain generally useful today, the phenominal success of random field models means that the kinds of inference problems we solve have 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 24 state-of-art techniques on a corpus of 2,300 energy minimization instances from 20 diverse computer vision applications. To ensure reproducibility, we evaluate all methods in the OpenGM2 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.

Correlation clustering, or multicut partitioning, is widely used in image segmentation for partitioning an undi-rected graph or image with positive and negative edge weights such that the sum of cut edge weights is minimized. Due to its NP-hardness, exact solvers do not scale and ap-proximative solvers often give unsatisfactory results. We investigate scalable methods for correlation cluster-ing. To this end we define fusion moves for the correlation clustering problem. Our algorithm iteratively fuses the cur-rent and a proposed partitioning which monotonously im-proves the partitioning and maintains a valid partitioning at all times. Furthermore, it scales to larger datasets, gives near optimal solutions, and at the same time shows a good anytime performance. 1.