Object segmentation requires both object-level information and low-level pixel data. This presents a challenge for feedforward networks: lower layers in convolutional nets capture rich spatial information, while upper layers encode object-level knowledge but are invariant to factors such as pose and appearance. In this work we propose to augment feedforward nets for object segmentation with a novel top-down refinement approach. The resulting bottom-up top-down architecture is capable of efficiently generating high-fidelity object masks. Similarly to skip connections, our approach leverages features at all layers of the net. Unlike skip connections, our approach does not attempt to output independent predictions at each layer. Instead, we first output a coarse mask encoding' in a feedforward pass, then refine this mask encoding in a top-down pass utilizing features at successively lower layers. The approach is simple, fast, and effective. Building on the recent DeepMask network for generating object proposals, we show accuracy improvements of 10-20 in average recall for various setups. Additionally, by optimizing the overall network architecture, our approach, which we call SharpMask, is 50 faster than the original DeepMask network (under .8s per image).
@cite_35 proposed to invert the pooling process in a CNN to generate progressively higher resolution input images by storing the switch' variables from the pooling operation. Deconv networks have recently been applied successfully to semantic segmentation @cite_15 . Deconv layers share similarities with our refinement module, however, switches' are communicated instead of the feature values, which limits the information that can be transferred. Finally, @cite_23 proposed to progressively increase the resolution of an optical flow map. This can be seen as a special case of our refinement approach where: (1) the features' for refinement are set to be the flow field itself, (2) no feature transform is applied to the bottom-up features, and (3) the approach is applied monolithically to the entire image. Restricting our method in any of these ways would cause it to fail in our setting as discussed in .
@cite_35 @cite_15 @cite_23
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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. Feature pooling layers (e.g., max pooling) in convolutional neural networks (CNNs) serve the dual purpose of providing increasingly abstract representations as well as yielding computational savings in subsequent convolutional layers. We view the pooling operation in CNNs as a two step procedure: first, a pooling window (e.g., 2&#xd7; 2) slides over the feature map with stride one which leaves the spatial resolution intact, and second, downsampling is performed by selecting one pixel from each non-overlapping pooling window in an often uniform and deterministic (e.g., top-left) manner. Our starting point in this work is the observation that this regularly spaced downsampling arising from non-overlapping windows, although intuitive from a signal processing perspective (which has the goal of signal reconstruction), is not necessarily optimal for learning (where the goal is to generalize). We study this aspect and propose a novel pooling strategy with stochastic spatial sampling (S3Pool), where the regular downsampling is replaced by a more general stochastic version. We observe that this general stochasticity acts as a strong regularizer, and can also be seen as doing implicit data augmentation by introducing distortions in the feature maps. We further introduce a mechanism to control the amount of distortion to suit different datasets and architectures. To demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach, we perform extensive experiments on several popular image classification benchmarks, observing excellent improvements over baseline models. The performance of single image super-resolution has achieved significant improvement by utilizing deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs). The features in deep CNN contain different types of information which make different contributions to image reconstruction. However, most CNN-based models lack discriminative ability for different types of information and deal with them equally, which results in the representational capacity of the models being limited. On the other hand, as the depth of neural networks grows, the long-term information coming from preceding layers is easy to be weaken or lost in late layers, which is adverse to super-resolving image. To capture more informative features and maintain long-term information for image super-resolution, we propose a channel-wise and spatial feature modulation (CSFM) network in which a sequence of feature-modulation memory (FMM) modules is cascaded with a densely connected structure to transform low-resolution features to high informative features. In each FMM module, we construct a set of channel-wise and spatial attention residual (CSAR) blocks and stack them in a chain structure to dynamically modulate multi-level features in a global-and-local manner. This feature modulation strategy enables the high contribution information to be enhanced and the redundant information to be suppressed. Meanwhile, for long-term information persistence, a gated fusion (GF) node is attached at the end of the FMM module to adaptively fuse hierarchical features and distill more effective information via the dense skip connections and the gating mechanism. Extensive quantitative and qualitative evaluations on benchmark datasets illustrate the superiority of our proposed method over the state-of-the-art methods.