On a parameter estimation method for Gibbs-Markov random fields

This correspondence is about a Gibbs-Markov random field (GMRF) parameter estimation technique proposed by Derin and Elliott (1987). We will refer to this technique as the histogramming (H) method. First, the relation of the H method to the (conditional) maximum likelihood method is considered. Second, a bias-reduction based modification of the H method is proposed to improve its performance, especially in the case of small amounts of image data.