  Sparse representations using overcomplete dictionaries have proved to be a
powerful tool in many signal processing applications such as denoising,
super-resolution, inpainting, compression or classification. The sparsity of
the representation very much depends on how well the dictionary is adapted to
the data at hand. In this paper, we propose a method for learning structured
multilevel dictionaries with discriminative constraints to make them well
suited for the supervised pixelwise classification of images. A multilevel
tree-structured discriminative dictionary is learnt for each class, with a
learning objective concerning the reconstruction errors of the image patches
around the pixels over each class-representative dictionary. After the initial
assignment of the class labels to image pixels based on their sparse
representations over the learnt dictionaries, the final classification is
achieved by smoothing the label image with a graph cut method and an erosion
method. Applied to a common set of texture images, our supervised
classification method shows competitive results with the state of the art.
