Many imaging tasks require global information about all pixels in an image. Conventional bottom-up classification networks globalize information by decreasing resolution; features are pooled and downsampled into a single output. But for semantic segmentation and object detection tasks, a network must provide higher-resolution pixel-level outputs. To globalize information while preserving resolution, many researchers propose the inclusion of sophisticated auxiliary blocks, but these come at the cost of a considerable increase in network size and computational cost. This paper proposes stacked u-nets (SUNets), which iteratively combine features from different resolution scales while maintaining resolution. SUNets leverage the information globalization power of u-nets in a deeper network architectures that is capable of handling the complexity of natural images. SUNets perform extremely well on semantic segmentation tasks using a small number of parameters.
Context Aggregation Modules: These architectures place a special module on top of a pre-trained network that integrates context information at different distance scales. The development of fast and efficient algorithm for DenseCRF @cite_29 led to the development of numerous algorithms @cite_50 @cite_46 @cite_42 @cite_4 incorporating it on top of the output belief map. Moreover, the joint training of CRF and CNN parameters was made possible by @cite_35 @cite_27 . @cite_24 , context information was integrated by processing a belief map using a cascade of dilated layers operating at progressively increasing dilation rates, and @cite_22 proposed a hybrid dilation convolution framework to alleviate gridding artifacts. ParseNet @cite_5 exploits image-level feature information at each layer to learn global contextual information. In contrast, @cite_38 @cite_26 @cite_50 realized substantial performance improvements by employing parallel layers of spatial pyramid pooling. The work @cite_38 spatially pools output feature maps at different scales, while @cite_26 @cite_50 advocates applying dilated convolution at varying dilation rates.
@cite_35 @cite_38 @cite_26 @cite_4 @cite_22 @cite_29 @cite_42 @cite_24 @cite_27 @cite_50 @cite_5 @cite_46
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Recent works have shown that exploiting multi-scale representations deeply learned via convolutional neural networks (CNN) is of tremendous importance for accurate contour detection. This paper presents a novel approach for predicting contours which advances the state of the art in two fundamental aspects, i.e. multi-scale feature generation and fusion. Different from previous works directly considering multi-scale feature maps obtained from the inner layers of a primary CNN architecture, we introduce a hierarchical deep model which produces more rich and complementary representations. Furthermore, to refine and robustly fuse the representations learned at different scales, the novel Attention-Gated Conditional Random Fields (AG-CRFs) are proposed. The experiments ran on two publicly available datasets (BSDS500 and NYUDv2) demonstrate the effectiveness of the latent AG-CRF model and of the overall hierarchical framework. We propose an end-to-end-trainable attention module for convolutional neural network (CNN) architectures built for image classification. The module takes as input the 2D feature vector maps which form the intermediate representations of the input image at different stages in the CNN pipeline, and outputs a 2D matrix of scores for each map. Standard CNN architectures are modified through the incorporation of this module, and trained under the constraint that a convex combination of the intermediate 2D feature vectors, as parametrised by the score matrices, must alone be used for classification. Incentivised to amplify the relevant and suppress the irrelevant or misleading, the scores thus assume the role of attention values. Our experimental observations provide clear evidence to this effect: the learned attention maps neatly highlight the regions of interest while suppressing background clutter. Consequently, the proposed function is able to bootstrap standard CNN architectures for the task of image classification, demonstrating superior generalisation over 6 unseen benchmark datasets. When binarised, our attention maps outperform other CNN-based attention maps, traditional saliency maps, and top object proposals for weakly supervised segmentation as demonstrated on the Object Discovery dataset. We also demonstrate improved robustness against the fast gradient sign method of adversarial attack. We propose an end-to-end-trainable attention module for convolutional neural network (CNN) architectures built for image classification. The module takes as input the 2D feature vector maps which form the intermediate representations of the input image at different stages in the CNN pipeline, and outputs a 2D matrix of scores for each map. Standard CNN architectures are modified through the incorporation of this module, and trained under the constraint that a convex combination of the intermediate 2D feature vectors, as parameterised by the score matrices, must be used for classification. Incentivised to amplify the relevant and suppress the irrelevant or misleading, the scores thus assume the role of attention values. Our experimental observations provide clear evidence to this effect: the learned attention maps neatly highlight the regions of interest while suppressing background clutter. Consequently, the proposed function is able to bootstrap standard CNN architectures for the task of image classification, demonstrating superior generalisation over 6 unseen benchmark datasets. When binarised, our attention maps outperform other CNN-based attention maps, traditional saliency maps, and top object proposals for weakly supervised segmentation as demonstrated on the Object Discovery dataset. We also demonstrate improved robustness against the fast gradient sign method of adversarial attack. In this work we address the task of semantic image segmentation with Deep Learning and make three main contributions that are experimentally shown to have substantial practical merit. First , we highlight convolution with upsampled filters, or ‘atrous convolution’, as a powerful tool in dense prediction tasks. Atrous convolution allows us to explicitly control the resolution at which feature responses are computed within Deep Convolutional Neural Networks. It also allows us to effectively enlarge the field of view of filters to incorporate larger context without increasing the number of parameters or the amount of computation. Second , we propose atrous spatial pyramid pooling (ASPP) to robustly segment objects at multiple scales. ASPP probes an incoming convolutional feature layer with filters at multiple sampling rates and effective fields-of-views, thus capturing objects as well as image context at multiple scales. Third , we improve the localization of object boundaries by combining methods from DCNNs and probabilistic graphical models. The commonly deployed combination of max-pooling and downsampling in DCNNs achieves invariance but has a toll on localization accuracy. We overcome this by combining the responses at the final DCNN layer with a fully connected Conditional Random Field (CRF), which is shown both qualitatively and quantitatively to improve localization performance. Our proposed “DeepLab” system sets the new state-of-art at the PASCAL VOC-2012 semantic image segmentation task, reaching 79.7 percent mIOU in the test set, and advances the results on three other datasets: PASCAL-Context, PASCAL-Person-Part, and Cityscapes. All of our code is made publicly available online.