Recently, fully convolutional neural networks (FCNs) have shown significant performance in image parsing, including scene parsing and object parsing. Different from generic object parsing tasks, hand parsing is more challenging due to small size, complex structure, heavy self-occlusion and ambiguous texture problems. In this paper, we propose a novel parsing framework, Multi-Scale Dual-Branch Fully Convolutional Network (MSDB-FCN), for hand parsing tasks. Our network employs a Dual-Branch architecture to extract features of hand area, paying attention on the hand itself. These features are used to generate multi-scale features with pyramid pooling strategy. In order to better encode multi-scale features, we design a Deconvolution and Bilinear Interpolation Block (DB-Block) for upsampling and merging the features of different scales. To address data imbalance, which is a common problem in many computer vision tasks as well as hand parsing tasks, we propose a generalization of Focal Loss, namely Multi-Class Balanced Focal Loss, to tackle data imbalance in multi-class classification. Extensive experiments on RHD-PARSING dataset demonstrate that our MSDB-FCN has achieved the state-of-the-art performance for hand parsing.
 Accurate semantic image segmentation requires the joint consideration of local appearance, semantic information, and global scene context. In today’s age of pre-trained deep networks and their powerful convolutional features, state-of-the-art semantic segmentation approaches differ mostly in how they choose to combine together these different kinds of information. In this work, we propose a novel scheme for aggregating features from different scales, which we refer to as Multi-Scale Context Intertwining (MSCI). In contrast to previous approaches, which typically propagate information between scales in a one-directional manner, we merge pairs of feature maps in a bidirectional and recurrent fashion, via connections between two LSTM chains. By training the parameters of the LSTM units on the segmentation task, the above approach learns how to extract powerful and effective features for pixel-level semantic segmentation, which are then combined hierarchically. Furthermore, rather than using fixed information propagation routes, we subdivide images into super-pixels, and use the spatial relationship between them in order to perform image-adapted context aggregation. Our extensive evaluation on public benchmarks indicates that all of the aforementioned components of our approach increase the effectiveness of information propagation throughout the network, and significantly improve its eventual segmentation accuracy. Scene parsing is challenging for unrestricted open vocabulary and diverse scenes. In this paper, we exploit the capability of global context information by different-region-based context aggregation through our pyramid pooling module together with the proposed pyramid scene parsing network (PSPNet). Our global prior representation is effective to produce good quality results on the scene parsing task, while PSPNet provides a superior framework for pixel-level prediction. The proposed approach achieves state-of-the-art performance on various datasets. It came first in ImageNet scene parsing challenge 2016, PASCAL VOC 2012 benchmark and Cityscapes benchmark. A single PSPNet yields the new record of mIoU accuracy 85.4 on PASCAL VOC 2012 and accuracy 80.2 on Cityscapes.  Existing deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) require a fixed-size (e.g. 224×224) input image. This requirement is “artificial” and may hurt the recognition accuracy for the images or sub-images of an arbitrary size scale. In this work, we equip the networks with a more principled pooling strategy, “spatial pyramid pooling”, to eliminate the above requirement. The new network structure, called SPP-net, can generate a fixed-length representation regardless of image size scale. By removing the fixed-size limitation, we can improve all CNN-based image classification methods in general. Our SPP-net achieves state-of-the-art accuracy on the datasets of ImageNet 2012, Pascal VOC 2007, and Caltech101. The topic of multi-person pose estimation has been largely improved recently, especially with the development of convolutional neural network. However, there still exist a lot of challenging cases, such as occluded keypoints, invisible keypoints and complex background, which cannot be well addressed. In this paper, we present a novel network structure called Cascaded Pyramid Network (CPN) which targets to relieve the problem from these "hard" keypoints. More specifically, our algorithm includes two stages: GlobalNet and RefineNet. GlobalNet is a feature pyramid network which can successfully localize the "simple" keypoints like eyes and hands but may fail to precisely recognize the occluded or invisible keypoints. Our RefineNet tries explicitly handling the "hard" keypoints by integrating all levels of feature representations from the GlobalNet together with an online hard keypoint mining loss. In general, to address the multi-person pose estimation problem, a top-down pipeline is adopted to first generate a set of human bounding boxes based on a detector, followed by our CPN for keypoint localization in each human bounding box. Based on the proposed algorithm, we achieve state-of-art results on the COCO keypoint benchmark, with average precision at 73.0 on the COCO test-dev dataset and 72.1 on the COCO test-challenge dataset, which is a 19 relative improvement compared with 60.5 from the COCO 2016 keypoint challenge. Code1 and the detection results for person used will be publicly available for further research.