Semantic octree: Unifying recognition, reconstruction and representation via an octree constrained higher order MRF

On the one hand, mainly within the computer vision community, multi-resolution image labelling problems with pixel, super-pixel and object levels, have made great progress towards the modelling of holistic scene understanding. On the other hand, mainly within the robotics and graphics communities, multi-resolution 3^D representations of the world have matured to be efficient and accurate. In this paper we bring together the two hands and move towards the new direction of unified recognition, reconstruction and representation. We tackle the problem by embedding an octree into a hierarchical robust P^N Markov Random Field. This allows us to jointly infer the multi-resolution 3^D volume along with the object-class labels, all within the constraints of an octree data-structure. The octree representation is chosen as this data-structure is efficient for further processing such as dynamic updates, data compression, and surface reconstruction. We perform experiments in inferring our semantic octree on the The kitti Vision Benchmark Suite in order to demonstrate its efficacy.