  In this paper, we propose an alternative method to estimate room layouts of
cluttered indoor scenes. This method enjoys the benefits of two novel
techniques. The first one is semantic transfer (ST), which is: (1) a
formulation to integrate the relationship between scene clutter and room layout
into convolutional neural networks; (2) an architecture that can be end-to-end
trained; (3) a practical strategy to initialize weights for very deep networks
under unbalanced training data distribution. ST allows us to extract highly
robust features under various circumstances, and in order to address the
computation redundance hidden in these features we develop a principled and
efficient inference scheme named physics inspired optimization (PIO). PIO's
basic idea is to formulate some phenomena observed in ST features into
mechanics concepts. Evaluations on public datasets LSUN and Hedau show that the
proposed method is more accurate than state-of-the-art methods.
