Competitive Analysis of Minimum-Cut Maximum Flow Algorithms in Vision Problems

Abstract: Rapid advances in image acquisition and storage technology underline the need for algorithms that are capable of solving large scale image processing and computer-vision problems. The minimum cut problem plays an important role in processing many of these imaging problems such as, image and video segmentation, stereo vision, multi-view reconstruction and surface fitting. While several min-cut/max-flow algorithms can be found in the literature, their performance in practice has been studied primarily outside the scope of computer vision. We present here the results of a comprehensive computational study, in terms of execution times and memory utilization, of four recently published algorithms, which optimally solve the {\em s-t} cut and maximum flow problems: (i) Goldberg's and Tarjan's {\em Push-Relabel}; (ii) Hochbaum's {\em pseudoflow}; (iii) Boykov's and Kolmogorov's {\em augmenting paths}; and (iv) Goldberg's {\em partial augment-relabel}. Our results demonstrate that the {\em Hochbaum's pseudoflow} algorithm, is faster and utilizes less memory than the other algorithms on all problem instances investigated.