Segmentation with depth but without detecting junctions

Given an image that depicts a scene with several objects in it, the goal of segmentation with depth is to automatically infer the shapes of the objects and the occlusion relations between them. Nitzberg, Mumford and Shiota formulated a variational approach to this problem: in their model, the solution is obtained as the minimizer of an energy. We describe a new technique of minimizing their energy that avoids explicit detection/connection of T-junctions.