Slice Sampling Particle Belief Propagation

Abstract

Inference in continuous label Markov random fields is a challenging task. We use particle belief propagation ( PBP ) for solving the inference problem in continuous label space. Sampling particles from the belief distribution is typically done by using Metropolis-Hastings ( MH ) Markov chain Monte Carlo ( MCMC ) methods which involves sampling from a proposal distribution. This proposal distribution has to be carefully designed depending on the particular model and input data to achieve fast convergence. We propose to avoid dependence on a proposal distribution by introducing a slice sampling based PBP algorithm. The proposed approach shows superior convergence performance on an image denoising toy example. Our findings are validated on a challenging relational 2D feature tracking application.