ICNet for Real-Time Semantic Segmentation on High-Resolution Images

Hengshuang Zhao, Xiaojuan Qi, Xiaoyong Shen, Jianping Shi, Jiaya Jia; Proceedings of the European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2018, pp. 405-420

We focus on the challenging task of real-time semantic segmentation in this paper. It finds many practical applications and yet is with fundamental difficulty of reducing a large portion of computation for pixel-wise label inference. We propose an image cascade network (ICNet) that incorporates multi-resolution branches under proper label guidance to address this challenge. We provide in-depth analysis of our framework and introduce the cascade feature fusion unit to quickly achieve high-quality segmentation. Our system yields real-time inference on a single GPU card with decent quality results evaluated on challenging datasets like Cityscapes, CamVid and COCO-Stuff.