Introducing explicit constraints on the structural predictions has been an effective way to improve the performance of semantic segmentation models. Existing methods are mainly based on insufficient hand-crafted rules that only partially capture the image structure, and some methods can also suffer from the efficiency issue. As a result, most of the state-of-the-art fully convolutional networks did not adopt these techniques. In this work, we propose a simple, fast yet effective method that exploits structural information through direct supervision with minor additional expense. To be specific, our method explicitly requires the network to predict semantic segmentation as well as dilated affinity, which is a sparse version of pair-wise pixel affinity. The capability of telling the relationships between pixels are directly built into the model and enhance the quality of segmentation in two stages. 1) Joint training with dilated affinity can provide robust feature representations and thus lead to finer segmentation results. 2) The extra output of affinity information can be further utilized to refine the original segmentation with a fast propagation process. Consistent improvements are observed on various benchmark datasets when applying our framework to the existing state-of-the-art model. Codes will be released soon.
Fully convolutional network @cite_23 is one of the pioneers that introduce deep learning into semantic segmentation and achieve impressive performance on benchmark datasets. Two important techniques are proposed and have been explored extensively afterward. First, they adapt networks that are originally designed for image recognition into a fully convolutional fashion and emit dense output directly. Later works found that dilated convolution @cite_18 @cite_27 alleviates the precision decrease caused by excessive spatial destruction. In addition, increasing the receptive field @cite_8 @cite_2 @cite_6 can give extra performance boost. Second, skip architecture was proposed to refine the segmentation results with multiple level features and various substitutions @cite_28 @cite_1 @cite_0 @cite_20 @cite_15 have been investigated after that.
@cite_18 @cite_8 @cite_28 @cite_1 @cite_6 @cite_0 @cite_27 @cite_23 @cite_2 @cite_15 @cite_20
2563705555 2951402970 2963727650 2789983685
Recently, very deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have shown outstanding performance in object recognition and have also been the first choice for dense classification problems such as semantic segmentation. However, repeated subsampling operations like pooling or convolution striding in deep CNNs lead to a significant decrease in the initial image resolution. Here, we present RefineNet, a generic multi-path refinement network that explicitly exploits all the information available along the down-sampling process to enable high-resolution prediction using long-range residual connections. In this way, the deeper layers that capture high-level semantic features can be directly refined using fine-grained features from earlier convolutions. The individual components of RefineNet employ residual connections following the identity mapping mindset, which allows for effective end-to-end training. Further, we introduce chained residual pooling, which captures rich background context in an efficient manner. We carry out comprehensive experiments and set new state-of-the-art results on seven public datasets. In particular, we achieve an intersection-over-union score of 83.4 on the challenging PASCAL VOC 2012 dataset, which is the best reported result to date. Recently, very deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have shown outstanding performance in object recognition and have also been the first choice for dense classification problems such as semantic segmentation. However, repeated subsampling operations like pooling or convolution striding in deep CNNs lead to a significant decrease in the initial image resolution. Here, we present RefineNet, a generic multi-path refinement network that explicitly exploits all the information available along the down-sampling process to enable high-resolution prediction using long-range residual connections. In this way, the deeper layers that capture high-level semantic features can be directly refined using fine-grained features from earlier convolutions. The individual components of RefineNet employ residual connections following the identity mapping mindset, which allows for effective end-to-end training. Further, we introduce chained residual pooling, which captures rich background context in an efficient manner. We carry out comprehensive experiments and set new state-of-the-art results on seven public datasets. In particular, we achieve an intersection-over-union score of 83.4 on the challenging PASCAL VOC 2012 dataset, which is the best reported result to date. Recent work has made significant progress in improving spatial resolution for pixelwise labeling with Fully Convolutional Network (FCN) framework by employing Dilated Atrous convolution, utilizing multi-scale features and refining boundaries. In this paper, we explore the impact of global contextual information in semantic segmentation by introducing the Context Encoding Module, which captures the semantic context of scenes and selectively highlights class-dependent featuremaps. The proposed Context Encoding Module significantly improves semantic segmentation results with only marginal extra computation cost over FCN. Our approach has achieved new state-of-the-art results 51.7 mIoU on PASCAL-Context, 85.9 mIoU on PASCAL VOC 2012. Our single model achieves a final score of 0.5567 on ADE20K test set, which surpasses the winning entry of COCO-Place Challenge 2017. In addition, we also explore how the Context Encoding Module can improve the feature representation of relatively shallow networks for the image classification on CIFAR-10 dataset. Our 14 layer network has achieved an error rate of 3.45 , which is comparable with state-of-the-art approaches with over 10A— more layers. The source code for the complete system are publicly available1. Recent work has made significant progress in improving spatial resolution for pixelwise labeling with Fully Convolutional Network (FCN) framework by employing Dilated Atrous convolution, utilizing multi-scale features and refining boundaries. In this paper, we explore the impact of global contextual information in semantic segmentation by introducing the Context Encoding Module, which captures the semantic context of scenes and selectively highlights class-dependent featuremaps. The proposed Context Encoding Module significantly improves semantic segmentation results with only marginal extra computation cost over FCN. Our approach has achieved new state-of-the-art results 51.7 mIoU on PASCAL-Context, 85.9 mIoU on PASCAL VOC 2012. Our single model achieves a final score of 0.5567 on ADE20K test set, which surpass the winning entry of COCO-Place Challenge in 2017. In addition, we also explore how the Context Encoding Module can improve the feature representation of relatively shallow networks for the image classification on CIFAR-10 dataset. Our 14 layer network has achieved an error rate of 3.45 , which is comparable with state-of-the-art approaches with over 10 times more layers. The source code for the complete system are publicly available.