Graph-Guided Architecture Search for Real-Time Semantic Segmentation

Peiwen Lin, Peng Sun, Guangliang Cheng, Sirui Xie, Xi Li, Jianping Shi; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2020, pp. 4203-4212

Abstract


Designing a lightweight semantic segmentation network often requires researchers to find a trade-off between performance and speed, which is always empirical due to the limited interpretability of neural networks. In order to release researchers from these tedious mechanical trials, we propose a Graph-guided Architecture Search (GAS) pipeline to automatically search real-time semantic segmentation networks. Unlike previous works that use a simplified search space and stack a repeatable cell to form a network, we introduce a novel search mechanism with a new search space where a lightweight model can be effectively explored through the cell-level diversity and latency oriented constraint. Specifically, to produce the cell-level diversity, the cell-sharing constraint is eliminated through the cell-independent manner. Then a graph convolution network (GCN) is seamlessly integrated as a communication mechanism between cells. Finally, a latency-oriented constraint is endowed into the search process to balance the speed and performance. Extensive experiments on Cityscapes and CamVid datasets demonstrate that GAS achieves the new state-of-the-art trade-off between accuracy and speed. In particular, on Cityscapes dataset, GAS achieves the new best performance of 73.5% mIoU with the speed of 108.4 FPS on Titan Xp.

Related Material


[pdf] [supp] [arXiv]
[bibtex]
@InProceedings{Lin_2020_CVPR,
author = {Lin, Peiwen and Sun, Peng and Cheng, Guangliang and Xie, Sirui and Li, Xi and Shi, Jianping},
title = {Graph-Guided Architecture Search for Real-Time Semantic Segmentation},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR)},
month = {June},
year = {2020}
}