Combinatorial Preconditioners and Multilevel Solvers for Problems in Computer Vision and Image Processing

Linear systems and eigen-calculations on symmetric diagonally dominant matrices (SDDs) occur ubiquitously in computer vision, computer graphics, and machine learning. In the past decade a multitude of specialized solvers have been developed to tackle restricted instances of SDD systems for a diverse collection of problems including segmentation, gradient inpainting and total variation. In this paper we explain and apply the support theory of graphs, a set of of techniques developed by the computer science theory community, to construct SDD solvers with provable properties. To demonstrate the power of these techniques, we describe an efficient multigrid-like solver which is based on support theory principles. The solver tackles problems in fairly general and arbitrarily weighted topologies not supported by prior solvers. It achieves state of the art empirical results while providing robust guarantees on the speed of convergence. The method is evaluated on a variety of vision applications.