ISDNet: Integrating Shallow and Deep Networks for Efficient Ultra-High Resolution Segmentation

Shaohua Guo, Liang Liu, Zhenye Gan, Yabiao Wang, Wuhao Zhang, Chengjie Wang, Guannan Jiang, Wei Zhang, Ran Yi, Lizhuang Ma, Ke Xu; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2022, pp. 4361-4370

The huge burden of computation and memory are two obstacles in ultra-high resolution image segmentation. To tackle these issues, most of the previous works follow the global-local refinement pipeline, which pays more attention to the memory consumption but neglects the inference speed. In comparison to the pipeline that partitions the large image into small local regions, we focus on inferring the whole image directly. In this paper, we propose ISDNet, a novel ultra-high resolution segmentation framework that integrates the shallow and deep networks in a new manner, which significantly accelerates the inference speed while achieving accurate segmentation. To further exploit the relationship between the shallow and deep features, we propose a novel Relational-Aware feature Fusion module, which ensures high performance and robustness of our framework. Extensive experiments on Deepglobe, Inria Aerial, and Cityscapes datasets demonstrate our performance is consistently superior to state-of-the-arts. Specifically, it achieves 73.30 mIoU with a speed of 27.70 FPS on Deepglobe, which is more accurate and 172 x faster than the recent competitor. Code available at https://github.com/cedricgsh/ISDNet.