Decoders Matter for Semantic Segmentation: Data-Dependent Decoding Enables Flexible Feature Aggregation

Zhi Tian, Tong He, Chunhua Shen, Youliang Yan; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2019, pp. 3126-3135

Abstract


Recent semantic segmentation methods exploit encoder-decoder architectures to produce the desired pixel-wise segmentation prediction. The last layer of the decoders is typically a bilinear upsampling procedure to recover the final pixel-wise prediction. We empirically show that this oversimple and data-independent bilinear upsampling may lead to sub-optimal results. In this work, we propose a data-dependent upsampling (DUpsampling) to replace bilinear, which takes advantages of the redundancy in the label space of semantic segmentation and is able to recover the pixel-wise prediction from low-resolution outputs of CNNs. The main advantage of the new upsampling layer lies in that with a relatively lower-resolution feature map such as 1/16 or 1/32 of the input size, we can achieve even better segmentation accuracy, significantly reducing computation complexity. This is made possible by 1) the new upsampling layer's much improved reconstruction capability; and more importantly 2) the DUpsampling based decoder's flexibility in leveraging almost arbitrary combinations of the CNN encoders' features. Experiments on PASCAL VOC demonstrate that with much less computation complexity, our decoder outperforms the state-of-the-art decoder. Finally, without any post-processing, the framework equipped with our proposed decoder achieves new state-of-the-art performance on two datasets: 88.1% mIOU on PASCAL VOC with 30% computation of the previously best model; and 52.5% mIOU on PASCAL Context.

Related Material


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[bibtex]
@InProceedings{Tian_2019_CVPR,
author = {Tian, Zhi and He, Tong and Shen, Chunhua and Yan, Youliang},
title = {Decoders Matter for Semantic Segmentation: Data-Dependent Decoding Enables Flexible Feature Aggregation},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR)},
month = {June},
year = {2019}
}