text: Pixel-level semantic segmentation is a challenging task with a huge amount of computation, especially if the input sizes are large. In the segmentation network, apart from the pyramid backbone network, an extra decoder network is often employed to recover the spatial detail information. In this paper, we put forward a method for single-shot segmentation in a feature residual pyramid network (RPNet), which learns the coarse results and residuals of segmentations by decomposing the label at different levels of residual blocks. Specifically speaking, we use the residual features to learn the edges and details, and we also use the top-level feature to learn the coarse segmentation result. At the testing phase, the predicted residuals are used to enhance the details of the coarse segmentation result. Residual learning blocks split the network into several shallow sub-networks by level-wise training, which facilitates the gradient propagation in the RPNet. We then evaluate the proposed method and compare it with the recent state-of-the-art methods on CamVid and Cityscapes datasets. The proposed single-shot segmentation based on the RPNet achieves impressive results with high efficiency on the pixel-level segmentation task.
  @cite_3: The ability to perform pixel-wise semantic segmentation in real-time is of paramount importance in practical mobile applications. Recent deep neural networks aimed at this task have the disadvantage of requiring a large number of floating point operations and have long run-times that hinder their usability. In this paper, we propose a novel deep neural network architecture named ENet (efficient neural network), created specifically for tasks requiring low latency operation. ENet is up to 18x faster, requires 75x less FLOPs, has 79x less parameters, and provides similar or better accuracy to existing models. We have tested it on CamVid, Cityscapes and SUN datasets and report on comparisons with existing state-of-the-art methods, and the trade-offs between accuracy and processing time of a network. We present performance measurements of the proposed architecture on embedded systems and suggest possible software improvements that could make ENet even faster.
summary: Real-time segmentation models prefer thin networks with fewer filters so that computing cost can be reduced such as ENet @cite_3 . But simply reducing computation will lead to degradation in performance.