# Trace An Isoline of an Expensive 2D Function

I have a problem similar in formulation to this post, with a few notable differences:

What simple methods are there for adaptively sampling a 2D function?

Like in that post:

• I have a $f(x,y)$ and evaluation of this function is somewhat expensive to compute

Unlike in that post:

• I am interested not in the value of the function accurately everywhere, but only in finding a single isocontour of the function.

• I can make significant assertions about the autocorrelation of the function, and consequently the scale of smoothness.

Is there an intelligent way to step along/sample this function and find this contour?

The function is the computation of Haralick Features over $N$ pixles surrounding the point, and soft classification by some sort of classifier/regressor. The output of this is a floating point number which indicates which texture/material the point belongs to. The scaling of this number can be estimated class probablities (SoftSVM or statistical methods etc) or something really simple like the output of a linear/logistic regression. Classification/regression is accurate and cheap compared to time taken for feature extraction from the image.

Statistics surrounding $N$ means that the window is typically sampling overlapping regions, and as such there is significant correlation between nearby samples. (Something I can even approach numerically/symbolically) Consequently, this can be thought of as a more complex function of $f(x, y, N)$ where larger $N$ will give an estimate more related to the neighborhood (highly correlated), and a smaller $N$ will give a more variable, but more local estimate.

## Things I Have Tried:

• Brute Computation - Works well. 95% correct segmentation with constant $N$. The results look fantastic when contoured using any standard method after that. This takes forever. I can simplify the features calculated on a per-sample basis, but ideally I want to avoid this to keep this code general to images with textures who's differences show up in different parts of the feature space.

• Dumb Stepping - Take a single pixel "step" in each direction and pick the direction to move based on closeness to iso-line value. Still pretty slow, and it will ignore bifurcation of an isoline. Also, in areas with a flat gradient it will "wander" or double back on itself.

I am thinking I want to do something like the subdivison proposed in the first link, but pruned for boxes which bound the isoline of interest. I feel like I should be able to leverage $N$ also, but I am not sure how to approach that.

• I have exactly the same problem, except that it is a likelihood function I want to contour and it is expensive because at each point I need to perform a minimisation. Did you make any progress and/or can you point out how you eventually went about this? – adavid Oct 6 '12 at 15:54
• I just checked the solution I converged on. (see below) – meawoppl Oct 10 '12 at 2:38