No Arabic abstract
Long-range contextual information is essential for achieving high-performance semantic segmentation. Previous feature re-weighting methods demonstrate that using global context for re-weighting feature channels can effectively improve the accuracy of semantic segmentation. However, the globally-sharing feature re-weighting vector might not be optimal for regions of different classes in the input image. In this paper, we propose a Context-adaptive Convolution Network (CaC-Net) to predict a spatially-varying feature weighting vector for each spatial location of the semantic feature maps. In CaC-Net, a set of context-adaptive convolution kernels are predicted from the global contextual information in a parameter-efficient manner. When used for convolution with the semantic feature maps, the predicted convolutional kernels can generate the spatially-varying feature weighting factors capturing both global and local contextual information. Comprehensive experimental results show that our CaC-Net achieves superior segmentation performance on three public datasets, PASCAL Context, PASCAL VOC 2012 and ADE20K.
Unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) aims to adapt a model of the labeled source domain to an unlabeled target domain. Although the domain shifts may exist in various dimensions such as appearance, textures, etc, the contextual dependency, which is generally shared across different domains, is neglected by recent methods. In this paper, we utilize this important clue as explicit prior knowledge and propose end-to-end Context-Aware Mixup (CAMix) for domain adaptive semantic segmentation. Firstly, we design a contextual mask generation strategy by leveraging accumulated spatial distributions and contextual relationships. The generated contextual mask is critical in this work and will guide the domain mixup. In addition, we define the significance mask to indicate where the pixels are credible. To alleviate the over-alignment (e.g., early performance degradation), the source and target significance masks are mixed based on the contextual mask into the mixed significance mask, and we introduce a significance-reweighted consistency loss on it. Experimental results show that the proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art methods by a large margin on two widely-used domain adaptation benchmarks, i.e., GTAV $rightarrow $ Cityscapes and SYNTHIA $rightarrow $ Cityscapes.
Zero padding is widely used in convolutional neural networks to prevent the size of feature maps diminishing too fast. However, it has been claimed to disturb the statistics at the border. As an alternative, we propose a context-aware (CA) padding approach to extend the image. We reformulate the padding problem as an image extrapolation problem and illustrate the effects on the semantic segmentation task. Using context-aware padding, the ResNet-based segmentation model achieves higher mean Intersection-Over-Union than the traditional zero padding on the Cityscapes and the dataset of DeepGlobe satellite imaging challenge. Furthermore, our padding does not bring noticeable overhead during training and testing.
One of the practical choices for making a lightweight semantic segmentation model is to combine a depth-wise separable convolution with a dilated convolution. However, the simple combination of these two methods results in an over-simplified operation which causes severe performance degradation due to loss of information contained in the feature map. To resolve this problem, we propose a new block called Concentrated-Comprehensive Convolution (C3) which applies the asymmetric convolutions before the depth-wise separable dilated convolution to compensate for the information loss due to dilated convolution. The C3 block consists of a concentration stage and a comprehensive convolution stage. The first stage uses two depth-wise asymmetric convolutions for compressed information from the neighboring pixels to alleviate the information loss. The second stage increases the receptive field by using a depth-wise separable dilated convolution from the feature map of the first stage. We applied the C3 block to various segmentation frameworks (ESPNet, DRN, ERFNet, ENet) for proving the beneficial properties of our proposed method. Experimental results show that the proposed method preserves the original accuracies on Cityscapes dataset while reducing the complexity. Furthermore, we modified ESPNet to achieve about 2% better performance while reducing the number of parameters by half and the number of FLOPs by 35% compared with the original ESPNet. Finally, experiments on ImageNet classification task show that C3 block can successfully replace dilated convolutions.
The way features propagate in Fully Convolutional Networks is of momentous importance to capture multi-scale contexts for obtaining precise segmentation masks. This paper proposes a novel series-parallel hybrid paradigm called the Chained Context Aggregation Module (CAM) to diversify feature propagation. CAM gains features of various spatial scales through chain-connected ladder-style information flows and fuses them in a two-stage process, namely pre-fusion and re-fusion. The serial flow continuously increases receptive fields of output neurons and those in parallel encode different region-based contexts. Each information flow is a shallow encoder-decoder with appropriate down-sampling scales to sufficiently capture contextual information. We further adopt an attention model in CAM to guide feature re-fusion. Based on these developments, we construct the Chained Context Aggregation Network (CANet), which employs an asymmetric decoder to recover precise spatial details of prediction maps. We conduct extensive experiments on six challenging datasets, including Pascal VOC 2012, Pascal Context, Cityscapes, CamVid, SUN-RGBD and GATECH. Results evidence that CANet achieves state-of-the-art performance.
Data augmentation is vital for deep learning neural networks. By providing massive training samples, it helps to improve the generalization ability of the model. Weakly supervised semantic segmentation (WSSS) is a challenging problem that has been deeply studied in recent years, conventional data augmentation approaches for WSSS usually employ geometrical transformations, random cropping and color jittering. However, merely increasing the same contextual semantic data does not bring much gain to the networks to distinguish the objects, e.g., the correct image-level classification of aeroplane may be not only due to the recognition of the object itself, but also its co-occurrence context like sky, which will cause the model to focus less on the object features. To this end, we present a Context Decoupling Augmentation (CDA) method, to change the inherent context in which the objects appear and thus drive the network to remove the dependence between object instances and contextual information. To validate the effectiveness of the proposed method, extensive experiments on PASCAL VOC 2012 dataset with several alternative network architectures demonstrate that CDA can boost various popular WSSS methods to the new state-of-the-art by a large margin.