Explicit inversion: an approach to image analysis

摘要

Image analysis can be expressed as an inverse problem. Given an image, which is the output of some complicated and possibly unknown function, our goal is to estimate the parameters of that function. Formally, at least, the solution to the problem can be found by inverting the function which produced the image. In practice, this inversion requires two major elements; a feature extractor and a parameter estimator. While there has been much research into these two elements, they are generally designed separately from one another. In this paper we introduce an approach to image analysis founded on the belief that these two elements should be designed as a pair. We label our approach ‘explicit inversion’, because it allows us to replace the problem of implicitly inverting an unknown, possibly high-dimensional function, with that of explicitly inverting a known, low-dimensional function. As a result we achieve major time reductions over the standard approaches while achieving comparable accuracy.