No Arabic abstract
We present an instance segmentation scheme based on pixel affinity information, which is the relationship of two pixels belonging to a same instance. In our scheme, we use two neural networks with similar structure. One is to predict pixel level semantic score and the other is designed to derive pixel affinities. Regarding pixels as the vertexes and affinities as edges, we then propose a simple yet effective graph merge algorithm to cluster pixels into instances. Experimental results show that our scheme can generate fine-grained instance mask. With Cityscapes training data, the proposed scheme achieves 27.3 AP on test set.
Most of the modern instance segmentation approaches fall into two categories: region-based approaches in which object bounding boxes are detected first and later used in cropping and segmenting instances; and keypoint-based approaches in which individual instances are represented by a set of keypoints followed by a dense pixel clustering around those keypoints. Despite the maturity of these two paradigms, we would like to report an alternative affinity-based paradigm where instances are segmented based on densely predicted affinities and graph partitioning algorithms. Such affinity-based approaches indicate that high-level graph features other than regions or keypoints can be directly applied in the instance segmentation task. In this work, we propose Deep Affinity Net, an effective affinity-based approach accompanied with a new graph partitioning algorithm Cascade-GAEC. Without bells and whistles, our end-to-end model results in 32.4% AP on Cityscapes val and 27.5% AP on test. It achieves the best single-shot result as well as the fastest running time among all affinity-based models. It also outperforms the region-based method Mask R-CNN.
Weakly supervised semantic segmentation is receiving great attention due to its low human annotation cost. In this paper, we aim to tackle bounding box supervised semantic segmentation, i.e., training accurate semantic segmentation models using bounding box annotations as supervision. To this end, we propose Affinity Attention Graph Neural Network ($A^2$GNN). Following previous practices, we first generate pseudo semantic-aware seeds, which are then formed into semantic graphs based on our newly proposed affinity Convolutional Neural Network (CNN). Then the built graphs are input to our $A^2$GNN, in which an affinity attention layer is designed to acquire the short- and long- distance information from soft graph edges to accurately propagate semantic labels from the confident seeds to the unlabeled pixels. However, to guarantee the precision of the seeds, we only adopt a limited number of confident pixel seed labels for $A^2$GNN, which may lead to insufficient supervision for training. To alleviate this issue, we further introduce a new loss function and a consistency-checking mechanism to leverage the bounding box constraint, so that more reliable guidance can be included for the model optimization. Experiments show that our approach achieves new state-of-the-art performances on Pascal VOC 2012 datasets (val: 76.5%, test: 75.2%). More importantly, our approach can be readily applied to bounding box supervised instance segmentation task or other weakly supervised semantic segmentation tasks, with state-of-the-art or comparable performance among almot all weakly supervised tasks on PASCAL VOC or COCO dataset. Our source code will be available at https://github.com/zbf1991/A2GNN.
Semantic segmentation with dense pixel-wise annotation has achieved excellent performance thanks to deep learning. However, the generalization of semantic segmentation in the wild remains challenging. In this paper, we address the problem of unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) in semantic segmentation. Motivated by the fact that source and target domain have invariant semantic structures, we propose to exploit such invariance across domains by leveraging co-occurring patterns between pairwise pixels in the output of structured semantic segmentation. This is different from most existing approaches that attempt to adapt domains based on individual pixel-wise information in image, feature, or output level. Specifically, we perform domain adaptation on the affinity relationship between adjacent pixels termed affinity space of source and target domain. To this end, we develop two affinity space adaptation strategies: affinity space cleaning and adversarial affinity space alignment. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed method achieves superior performance against some state-of-the-art methods on several challenging benchmarks for semantic segmentation across domains. The code is available at https://github.com/idealwei/ASANet.
Panoptic segmentation requires segments of both things (countable object instances) and stuff (uncountable and amorphous regions) within a single output. A common approach involves the fusion of instance segmentation (for things) and semantic segmentation (for stuff) into a non-overlapping placement of segments, and resolves overlaps. However, instance ordering with detection confidence do not correlate well with natural occlusion relationship. To resolve this issue, we propose a branch that is tasked with modeling how two instance masks should overlap one another as a binary relation. Our method, named OCFusion, is lightweight but particularly effective in the instance fusion process. OCFusion is trained with the ground truth relation derived automatically from the existing dataset annotations. We obtain state-of-the-art results on COCO and show competitive results on the Cityscapes panoptic segmentation benchmark.
Long-tailed class distributions are prevalent among the practical applications of object detection and instance segmentation. Prior work in long-tail instance segmentation addresses the imbalance of losses between rare and frequent categories by reducing the penalty for a model incorrectly predicting a rare class label. We demonstrate that the rare categories are heavily suppressed by correct background predictions, which reduces the probability for all foreground categories with equal weight. Due to the relative infrequency of rare categories, this leads to an imbalance that biases towards predicting more frequent categories. Based on this insight, we develop DropLoss -- a novel adaptive loss to compensate for this imbalance without a trade-off between rare and frequent categories. With this loss, we show state-of-the-art mAP across rare, common, and frequent categories on the LVIS dataset.