Semantic segmentation is a fundamental task in computer vision, which can be considered as a per-pixel classification problem. Recently, although fully convolutional neural network (FCN) based approaches have made remarkable progress in such task, aggregating local and contextual information in convolutional feature maps is still a challenging problem. In this paper, we argue that, when predicting the category of a given pixel, the regions close to the target are more important than those far from it. To tackle this problem, we then propose an effective yet efficient approach named Vortex Pooling to effectively utilize contextual information. Empirical studies are also provided to validate the effectiveness of the proposed method. To be specific, our approach outperforms the previous state-of-the-art model named DeepLab v3 by 1.5 on the PASCAL VOC 2012 val set and 0.6 on the test set by replacing the Atrous Spatial Pyramid Pooling (ASPP) module in DeepLab v3 with the proposed Vortex Pooling. Moreover, our model (10.13FPS) shares similar computation cost with DeepLab v3 (10.37 FPS).
We present a technique for adding global context to deep convolutional networks for semantic segmentation. The approach is simple, using the average feature for a layer to augment the features at each location. In addition, we study several idiosyncrasies of training, significantly increasing the performance of baseline networks (e.g. from FCN). When we add our proposed global feature, and a technique for learning normalization parameters, accuracy increases consistently even over our improved versions of the baselines. Our proposed approach, ParseNet, achieves state-of-the-art performance on SiftFlow and PASCAL-Context with small additional computational cost over baselines, and near current state-of-the-art performance on PASCAL VOC 2012 semantic segmentation with a simple approach. Code is available at this https URL .  One of recent trends [31, 32, 14] in network architecture design is stacking small filters (e.g., 1x1 or 3x3) in the entire network because the stacked small filters is more efficient than a large kernel, given the same computational complexity. However, in the field of semantic segmentation, where we need to perform dense per-pixel prediction, we find that the large kernel (and effective receptive field) plays an important role when we have to perform the classification and localization tasks simultaneously. Following our design principle, we propose a Global Convolutional Network to address both the classification and localization issues for the semantic segmentation. We also suggest a residual-based boundary refinement to further refine the object boundaries. Our approach achieves state-of-art performance on two public benchmarks and significantly outperforms previous results, 82.2 (vs 80.2 ) on PASCAL VOC 2012 dataset and 76.9 (vs 71.8 ) on Cityscapes dataset.