Vanishing-Point-Guided Video Semantic Segmentation of Driving Scenes

Diandian Guo, Deng-Ping Fan, Tongyu Lu, Christos Sakaridis, Luc Van Gool; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2024, pp. 3544-3553

The estimation of implicit cross-frame correspondences and the high computational cost have long been major challenges in video semantic segmentation (VSS) for driving scenes. Prior works utilize keyframes feature propagation or cross-frame attention to address these issues. By contrast we are the first to harness vanishing point (VP) priors for more effective segmentation. Intuitively objects near VPs (i.e. away from the vehicle) are less discernible. Moreover they tend to move radially away from the VP over time in the usual case of a forward-facing camera a straight road and linear forward motion of the vehicle. Our novel efficient network for VSS named VPSeg incorporates two modules that utilize exactly this pair of static and dynamic VP priors: sparse-to-dense feature mining (DenseVP) and VP-guided motion fusion (MotionVP). MotionVP employs VP-guided motion estimation to establish explicit correspondences across frames and help attend to the most relevant features from neighboring frames while DenseVP enhances weak dynamic features in distant regions around VPs. These modules operate within a context-detail framework which separates contextual features from high-resolution local features at different input resolutions to reduce computational costs. Contextual and local features are integrated through contextualized motion attention (CMA) for the final prediction. Extensive experiments on two popular driving segmentation benchmarks Cityscapes and ACDC demonstrate that VPSeg outperforms previous SOTA methods with only modest computational overhead.