Gated-SCNN: Gated Shape CNNs for Semantic Segmentation

Towaki Takikawa, David Acuna, Varun Jampani, Sanja Fidler; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2019, pp. 5229-5238

Abstract


Current state-of-the-art methods for image segmentation form a dense image representation where the color, shape and texture information are all processed together inside a deep CNN. This however may not be ideal as they contain very different type of information relevant for recognition. Here, we propose a new two-stream CNN architecture for semantic segmentation that explicitly wires shape information as a separate processing branch, i.e. shape stream, that processes information in parallel to the classical stream. Key to this architecture is a new type of gates that connect the intermediate layers of the two streams. Specifically, we use the higher-level activations in the classical stream to gate the lower-level activations in the shape stream, effectively removing noise and helping the shape stream to only focus on processing the relevant boundary-related information. This enables us to use a very shallow architecture for the shape stream that operates on the image-level resolution. Our experiments show that this leads to a highly effective architecture that produces sharper predictions around object boundaries and significantly boosts performance on thinner and smaller objects. Our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on the Cityscapes benchmark, in terms of both mask (mIoU) and boundary (F-score) quality, improving by 2% and 4% over strong baselines.

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[bibtex]
@InProceedings{Takikawa_2019_ICCV,
author = {Takikawa, Towaki and Acuna, David and Jampani, Varun and Fidler, Sanja},
title = {Gated-SCNN: Gated Shape CNNs for Semantic Segmentation},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV)},
month = {October},
year = {2019}
}