An energy minimisation approach to attributed graph regularisation

In this paper, we propose a novel approach to graph regularisation based on energy minimisation. Our method hinges in the use of a Ginzburg-Landau functional whose extremum is achieved efficiently by a gradient descend optimisation process. As a result of the treatment given in this paper to the regularisation problem, constraints can be enforced in a straightforward manner, This provides a means to solve a number of problems in computer vision and pattern recognition, To illustrate the general nature of our graph regularisation algorithm, we show results on two application vehicles, photometric stereo and image segmentation. Our experimental results demonstrate the efficacy of our method for both applications under study. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2007.