Fully Bayesian image segmentation-an engineering perspective

Developments in Markov chain Monte Carlo procedures have made it possible to perform fully Bayesian image segmentation. By this we mean that all the parameters are treated identically, be they the segmentation labels, the class parameters or the Markov random field prior parameters. We perform the analysis by sampling from the posterior distribution of all the parameters. Sampling from the MRF parameters has traditionally been considered if not intractable then at least computationally prohibitive. In the statistics literature there are descriptions of experiments showing that the MRF parameters may be sampled by approximating the partition function. These experiments are all, however, on 'toy' problems; for the typical size of image encountered in engineering applications the phase transition behaviour of the models becomes a major limiting factor in the estimation of the partition function. Nevertheless, we show that, with some care, fully Bayesian segmentation can be performed on realistic sized images. We also compare the fully Bayesian approach with the approximate pseudolikelihood method.