Probabilistic Graphical Models and their Applications Prof. Dr. Bernt Schiele

Overview

This course will introduce the basic concepts of probabilistic graphical models. Graphical Models are a unified framework that allow to express complex probability distributions in a compact way. Many machine learning applications are tackled by the use of these models, in this course we will highlight the possibilities with computer vision applications.

The main goal of the class is to understand the concepts behind graphical models and to give hands-on knowledge such that one is able to design models for computer vision applications but also in other domains. Therefore the lecture is roughly divided in two parts: learning about graphical models and seeing them in action.

In the first part of the lecture we will discuss the basics of solving these models, eg. for special kinds of graphs where efficient exact inference is possible and approimate methods for the general case. In the second part we will then discuss prominent applications for both low- and high-level computer vision problems. Some examples are statistical models of images (eg denoising), body pose estimation, person tracking, object detection and semantic image segmentation.

The exercises will be a mix of theoretical and practical assignments.