Convolutional decision trees for feature learning and segmentation

Abstract

Most computer vision and especially segmentation tasks require to extract features that represent local appearance of patches. Relevant features can be further processed by learning algorithms to infer posterior probabilities that pixels belong to an object of interest. Deep Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) define a particularly successful class of learning algorithms for semantic segmentation, although they proved to be very slow to train even when employing special purpose hardware. We propose, for the first time, a general purpose segmentation algorithm to extract the most informative and interpretable features as convolution kernels while simultaneously building a multivariate decision tree. The algorithm trains several orders of magnitude faster than regular CNNs and achieves state of the art results in processing quality on benchmark datasets.