Despite much research progress in image semantic segmentation, it remains challenging under adverse environmental conditions caused by imaging limitations of visible spectrum. While thermal infrared cameras have several advantages over cameras for the visible spectrum, such as operating in total darkness, insensitive to illumination variations, robust to shadow effects and strong ability to penetrate haze and smog. These advantages of thermal infrared cameras make the segmentation of semantic objects in day and night. In this paper, we propose a novel network architecture, called edge-conditioned convolutional neural network (EC-CNN), for thermal image semantic segmentation. Particularly, we elaborately design a gated feature-wise transform layer in EC-CNN to adaptively incorporate edge prior knowledge. The whole EC-CNN is end-to-end trained, and can generate high-quality segmentation results with the edge guidance. Meanwhile, we also introduce a new benchmark dataset named "Segment Objects in Day And night"(SODA) for comprehensive evaluations in thermal image semantic segmentation. SODA contains over 7,168 manually annotated and synthetically generated thermal images with 20 semantic region labels and from a broad range of viewpoints and scene complexities. Extensive experiments on SODA demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed EC-CNN against the state-of-the-art methods.
The most successful state-of-the-art deep learning techniques for semantic sementation stem from a common forerunner, the Fully Convolutional Network (FCN) @cite_40 . FCN replaces the later fully connected layers with convolutional ones to output fully resolution maps instead of classification scores, and is the first work to show how CNNs can be trained end-to-end for this problem. Based on FCN, several types of improvements have been made recently.
@cite_40
2563705555 2951402970 2469938794 2341555367
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. This paper describes a deep learning approach to semantic segmentation of very high resolution (aerial) images. Deep neural architectures hold the promise of end-to-end learning from raw images, making heuristic feature design obsolete. Over the last decade this idea has seen a revival, and in recent years deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have emerged as the method of choice for a range of image interpretation tasks like visual recognition and object detection. Still, standard CNNs do not lend themselves to per-pixel semantic segmentation, mainly because one of their fundamental principles is to gradually aggregate information over larger and larger image regions, making it hard to disentangle contributions from different pixels. Very recently two extensions of the CNN framework have made it possible to trace the semantic information back to a precise pixel position: deconvolutional network layers undo the spatial downsampling, and Fully Convolution Networks (FCNs) modify the fully connected classification layers of the network in such a way that the location of individual activations remains explicit. We design a FCN which takes as input intensity and range data and, with the help of aggressive deconvolution and recycling of early network layers, converts them into a pixelwise classification at full resolution. We discuss design choices and intricacies of such a network, and demonstrate that an ensemble of several networks achieves excellent results on challenging data such as the ISPRS semantic labeling benchmark, using only the raw data as input. Recent approaches for instance-aware semantic labeling have augmented convolutional neural networks (CNNs) with complex multi-task architectures or computationally expensive graphical models. We present a method that leverages a fully convolutional network (FCN) to predict semantic labels, depth and an instance-based encoding using each pixel’s direction towards its corresponding instance center. Subsequently, we apply low-level computer vision techniques to generate state-of-the-art instance segmentation on the street scene datasets KITTI and Cityscapes. Our approach outperforms existing works by a large margin and can additionally predict absolute distances of individual instances from a monocular image as well as a pixel-level semantic labeling.