Objectness Region Enhancement Networks for Scene Parsing

Semantic segmentation has recently witnessed rapid progress, but existing methods only focus on identifying objects or instances. In this work, we aim to address the task of semantic understanding of scenes with deep learning. Different from many existing methods, our method focuses on putting forward some techniques to improve the existing algorithms, rather than to propose a whole new framework. Objectness enhancement is the first effective technique. It exploits the detection module to produce object region proposals with category probability, and these regions are used to weight the parsing feature map directly. "Extra background" category, as a specific category, is often attached to the category space for improving parsing result in semantic and instance segmentation tasks. In scene parsing tasks, extra background category is still beneficial to improve the model in training. However, some pixels may be assigned into this nonexistent category in inference. Black-hole filling technique is proposed to avoid the incorrect classification. For verifying these two techniques, we integrate them into a parsing framework for generating parsing result. We call this unified framework as Objectness Enhancement Network (OENet). Compared with previous work, our proposed OENet system effectively improves the performance over the original model on SceneParse150 scene parsing dataset, reaching 38.4 mIoU (mean intersectionover-union) and 77.9% accuracy in the validation set without assembling multiple models. Its effectiveness is also verified on the Cityscapes dataset.