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_30: There is large consent that successful training of deep networks requires many thousand annotated training samples. In this paper, we present a network and training strategy that relies on the strong use of data augmentation to use the available annotated samples more efficiently. The architecture consists of a contracting path to capture context and a symmetric expanding path that enables precise localization. We show that such a network can be trained end-to-end from very few images and outperforms the prior best method (a sliding-window convolutional network) on the ISBI challenge for segmentation of neuronal structures in electron microscopic stacks. Using the same network trained on transmitted light microscopy images (phase contrast and DIC) we won the ISBI cell tracking challenge 2015 in these categories by a large margin. Moreover, the network is fast. Segmentation of a 512x512 image takes less than a second on a recent GPU. The full implementation (based on Caffe) and the trained networks are available at this http URL .
  @cite_31: State-of-the-art approaches for semantic image segmentation are built on Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs). The typical segmentation architecture is composed of (a) a downsampling path responsible for extracting coarse semantic features, followed by (b) an upsampling path trained to recover the input image resolution at the output of the model and, optionally, (c) a post-processing module (e.g. Conditional Random Fields) to refine the model predictions.,,,,,, Recently, a new CNN architecture, Densely Connected Convolutional Networks (DenseNets), has shown excellent results on image classification tasks. The idea of DenseNets is based on the observation that if each layer is directly connected to every other layer in a feed-forward fashion then the network will be more accurate and easier to train.,,,,,, In this paper, we extend DenseNets to deal with the problem of semantic segmentation. We achieve state-of-the-art results on urban scene benchmark datasets such as CamVid and Gatech, without any further post-processing module nor pretraining. Moreover, due to smart construction of the model, our approach has much less parameters than currently published best entries for these datasets.
  @cite_12: Recent work has shown that convolutional networks can be substantially deeper, more accurate, and efficient to train if they contain shorter connections between layers close to the input and those close to the output. In this paper, we embrace this observation and introduce the Dense Convolutional Network (DenseNet), which connects each layer to every other layer in a feed-forward fashion. Whereas traditional convolutional networks with L layers have L connections&#x2014;one between each layer and its subsequent layer&#x2014;our network has L(L+1) 2 direct connections. For each layer, the feature-maps of all preceding layers are used as inputs, and its own feature-maps are used as inputs into all subsequent layers. DenseNets have several compelling advantages: they alleviate the vanishing-gradient problem, strengthen feature propagation, encourage feature reuse, and substantially reduce the number of parameters. We evaluate our proposed architecture on four highly competitive object recognition benchmark tasks (CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, SVHN, and ImageNet). DenseNets obtain significant improvements over the state-of-the-art on most of them, whilst requiring less memory and computation to achieve high performance. Code and pre-trained models are available at https: github.com liuzhuang13 DenseNet.
summary: Encoder-decoder structure is often used to recover the spatial details in semantic segmentation. U-type structure, proposed in U-Net @cite_30 , use multi-path to help low-level features skip the middle layers and be combined with the refined high-level feature in the decoder, which enhance the performance on details. FC-DenseNet @cite_31 extended DenseNets @cite_12 in U-type structure and improve the upsampling path in decoder to reduce computation.