Abstract
We propose a novel convex prior for multilabel optimization which allows to impose arbitrary distances between labels. Only sym- metry, d(i, j ) ? 0 and d(i, i) = 0 are required. In contrast to previous grid based approaches for the nonmetric case, the proposed prior is for- mulated in the continuous setting avoiding grid artifacts. In particular, the model is easy to implement, provides a convex relaxation for the Mumford-Shah functional and yields comparable or superior results on the MSRC segmentation database comparing to metric or grid based approaches.