We present a deep learning framework for probabilistic pixel-wise semantic segmentation, which we term Bayesian SegNet. Semantic segmentation is an important tool for visual scene understanding and a meaningful measure of uncertainty is essential for decision making. Our contribution is a practical system which is able to predict pixel-wise class labels with a measure of model uncertainty. We achieve this by Monte Carlo sampling with dropout at test time to generate a posterior distribution of pixel class labels. In addition, we show that modelling uncertainty improves segmentation performance by 2-3 across a number of state of the art architectures such as SegNet, FCN and Dilation Network, with no additional parametrisation. We also observe a significant improvement in performance for smaller datasets where modelling uncertainty is more effective. We benchmark Bayesian SegNet on the indoor SUN Scene Understanding and outdoor CamVid driving scenes datasets.
On the other hand, the already significant parameterization of convolutional network architectures leaves them particularly susceptible to over-fitting without large amounts of training data. A technique known as is commonly used as a regularizer in convolutional neural networks to prevent overfitting and co-adaption of features @cite_37 . During training with stochastic gradient descent, randomly removes units within a network. By doing this it samples from a number of thinned networks with reduced width. At test time, standard dropout approximates the effect of averaging the predictions of all these thinnned networks by using the weights of the unthinned network. This is referred to as .
@cite_37
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Deep neural nets with a large number of parameters are very powerful machine learning systems. However, overfitting is a serious problem in such networks. Large networks are also slow to use, making it difficult to deal with overfitting by combining the predictions of many different large neural nets at test time. Dropout is a technique for addressing this problem. The key idea is to randomly drop units (along with their connections) from the neural network during training. This prevents units from co-adapting too much. During training, dropout samples from an exponential number of different "thinned" networks. At test time, it is easy to approximate the effect of averaging the predictions of all these thinned networks by simply using a single unthinned network that has smaller weights. This significantly reduces overfitting and gives major improvements over other regularization methods. We show that dropout improves the performance of neural networks on supervised learning tasks in vision, speech recognition, document classification and computational biology, obtaining state-of-the-art results on many benchmark data sets.