We present a conceptually simple, flexible, and general framework for object instance segmentation. Our approach efficiently detects objects in an image while simultaneously generating a high-quality segmentation mask for each instance. The method, called Mask R-CNN, extends Faster R-CNN by adding a branch for predicting an object mask in parallel with the existing branch for bounding box recognition. Mask R-CNN is simple to train and adds only a small overhead to Faster R-CNN, running at 5 fps. Moreover, Mask R-CNN is easy to generalize to other tasks, e.g., allowing us to estimate human poses in the same framework. We show top results in all three tracks of the COCO suite of challenges, including instance segmentation, bounding-box object detection, and person keypoint detection. Without tricks, Mask R-CNN outperforms all existing, single-model entries on every task, including the COCO 2016 challenge winners. We hope our simple and effective approach will serve as a solid baseline and help ease future research in instance-level recognition. Code will be made available.

Mask R-CNN

We present a novel and practical deep fully convolutional neural network architecture for semantic pixel-wise segmentation termed SegNet. This core trainable segmentation engine consists of an encoder network, a corresponding decoder network followed by a pixel-wise classification layer. The architecture of the encoder network is topologically identical to the 13 convolutional layers in the VGG16 network [1] . The role of the decoder network is to map the low resolution encoder feature maps to full input resolution feature maps for pixel-wise classification. The novelty of SegNet lies is in the manner in which the decoder upsamples its lower resolution input feature map(s). Specifically, the decoder uses pooling indices computed in the max-pooling step of the corresponding encoder to perform non-linear upsampling. This eliminates the need for learning to upsample. The upsampled maps are sparse and are then convolved with trainable filters to produce dense feature maps. We compare our proposed architecture with the widely adopted FCN [2] and also with the well known DeepLab-LargeFOV [3] , DeconvNet [4] architectures. This comparison reveals the memory versus accuracy trade-off involved in achieving good segmentation performance. SegNet was primarily motivated by scene understanding applications. Hence, it is designed to be efficient both in terms of memory and computational time during inference. It is also significantly smaller in the number of trainable parameters than other competing architectures and can be trained end-to-end using stochastic gradient descent. We also performed a controlled benchmark of SegNet and other architectures on both road scenes and SUN RGB-D indoor scene segmentation tasks. These quantitative assessments show that SegNet provides good performance with competitive inference time and most efficient inference memory-wise as compared to other architectures. We also provide a Caffe implementation of SegNet and a web demo at http://mi.eng.cam.ac.uk/projects/segnet/ .

SegNet: A Deep Convolutional Encoder-Decoder Architecture for Image Segmentation

We investigate conditional adversarial networks as a general-purpose solution to image-to-image translation problems. These networks not only learn the mapping from input image to output image, but also learn a loss function to train this mapping. This makes it possible to apply the same generic approach to problems that traditionally would require very different loss formulations. We demonstrate that this approach is effective at synthesizing photos from label maps, reconstructing objects from edge maps, and colorizing images, among other tasks. Moreover, since the release of the pix2pix software associated with this paper, hundreds of twitter users have posted their own artistic experiments using our system. As a community, we no longer hand-engineer our mapping functions, and this work suggests we can achieve reasonable results without handengineering our loss functions either.

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Image-to-Image Translation with Conditional Adversarial Networks

In this work we address the task of semantic image segmentation with Deep Learning and make three main contributions that are experimentally shown to have substantial practical merit. First , we highlight convolution with upsampled filters, or ‘atrous convolution’, as a powerful tool in dense prediction tasks. Atrous convolution allows us to explicitly control the resolution at which feature responses are computed within Deep Convolutional Neural Networks. It also allows us to effectively enlarge the field of view of filters to incorporate larger context without increasing the number of parameters or the amount of computation. Second , we propose atrous spatial pyramid pooling (ASPP) to robustly segment objects at multiple scales. ASPP probes an incoming convolutional feature layer with filters at multiple sampling rates and effective fields-of-views, thus capturing objects as well as image context at multiple scales. Third , we improve the localization of object boundaries by combining methods from DCNNs and probabilistic graphical models. The commonly deployed combination of max-pooling and downsampling in DCNNs achieves invariance but has a toll on localization accuracy. We overcome this by combining the responses at the final DCNN layer with a fully connected Conditional Random Field (CRF), which is shown both qualitatively and quantitatively to improve localization performance. Our proposed “DeepLab” system sets the new state-of-art at the PASCAL VOC-2012 semantic image segmentation task, reaching 79.7 percent mIOU in the test set, and advances the results on three other datasets: PASCAL-Context, PASCAL-Person-Part, and Cityscapes. All of our code is made publicly available online.

DeepLab: Semantic Image Segmentation with Deep Convolutional Nets, Atrous Convolution, and Fully Connected CRFs

Image-to-image translation is a class of vision and graphics problems where the goal is to learn the mapping between an input image and an output image using a training set of aligned image pairs. However, for many tasks, paired training data will not be available. We present an approach for learning to translate an image from a source domain X to a target domain Y in the absence of paired examples. Our goal is to learn a mapping G : X → Y such that the distribution of images from G(X) is indistinguishable from the distribution Y using an adversarial loss. Because this mapping is highly under-constrained, we couple it with an inverse mapping F : Y → X and introduce a cycle consistency loss to push F(G(X)) ≈ X (and vice versa). Qualitative results are presented on several tasks where paired training data does not exist, including collection style transfer, object transfiguration, season transfer, photo enhancement, etc. Quantitative comparisons against several prior methods demonstrate the superiority of our approach.

Unpaired Image-to-Image Translation Using Cycle-Consistent Adversarial Networks

Visual understanding of complex urban street scenes is an enabling factor for a wide range of applications. Object detection has benefited enormously from large-scale datasets, especially in the context of deep learning. For semantic urban scene understanding, however, no current dataset adequately captures the complexity of real-world urban scenes. To address this, we introduce Cityscapes, a benchmark suite and large-scale dataset to train and test approaches for pixel-level and instance-level semantic labeling. Cityscapes is comprised of a large, diverse set of stereo video sequences recorded in streets from 50 different cities. 5000 of these images have high quality pixel-level annotations, 20 000 additional images have coarse annotations to enable methods that leverage large volumes of weakly-labeled data. Crucially, our effort exceeds previous attempts in terms of dataset size, annotation richness, scene variability, and complexity. Our accompanying empirical study provides an in-depth analysis of the dataset characteristics, as well as a performance evaluation of several state-of-the-art approaches based on our benchmark.

https://www.cityscapes-dataset.com/wordpress/wp-content/papercite-data/pdf/cordts2016cityscapes.pdf

The Cityscapes Dataset for Semantic Urban Scene Understanding

Visual understanding of complex urban street scenes is an enabling factor for a wide range of applications. Object detection has benefited enormously from large-scale datasets, especially in the context of deep learning. For semantic urban scene understanding, however, no current dataset adequately captures the complexity of real-world urban scenes. 
To address this, we introduce Cityscapes, a benchmark suite and large-scale dataset to train and test approaches for pixel-level and instance-level semantic labeling. Cityscapes is comprised of a large, diverse set of stereo video sequences recorded in streets from 50 different cities. 5000 of these images have high quality pixel-level annotations; 20000 additional images have coarse annotations to enable methods that leverage large volumes of weakly-labeled data. Crucially, our effort exceeds previous attempts in terms of dataset size, annotation richness, scene variability, and complexity. Our accompanying empirical study provides an in-depth analysis of the dataset characteristics, as well as a performance evaluation of several state-of-the-art approaches based on our benchmark.

Semantic understanding of urban street scenes through visual perception has been widely studied due to many possible practical applications. Key challenges arise from the high visual complexity of such scenes. In this paper, we present ongoing work on a new large-scale dataset for (1) assessing the performance of vision algorithms for different tasks of semantic urban scene understanding, including scene labeling, instance-level scene labeling, and object detection; (2) supporting research that aims to exploit large volumes of (weakly) annotated data, e.g. for training deep neural networks. We aim to provide a large and diverse set of stereo video sequences recorded in street scenes from 50 different cities, with high quality pixel-level annotations of 5000 frames in addition to a larger set of weakly annotated frames. The dataset is thus an order of magnitude larger than similar previous attempts. Several aspects are still up for discussion, and timely feedback from the community would be greatly appreciated. Details on annotated classes and examples will be available at www. cityscapes-dataset.net. Moreover, we will use this website to collect remarks and suggestions.

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The Cityscapes Dataset

Autonomous driving is a key factor for future mobility. Properly perceiving the environment of the vehicles is essential for a safe driving, which requires computing accurate geometric and semantic information in real-time. In this paper, we challenge state-of-the-art computer vision algorithms for building a perception system for autonomous driving. An inherent drawback in the computation of visual semantics is the trade-off between accuracy and computational cost. We propose to circumvent this problem by following an offline-online strategy. During the offline stage dense 3D semantic maps are created. In the online stage the current driving area is recognized in the maps via a re-localization process, which allows to retrieve the pre-computed accurate semantics and 3D geometry in real-time. Then, detecting the dynamic obstacles we obtain a rich understanding of the current scene. We evaluate quantitatively our proposal in the KITTI dataset and discuss the related open challenges for the computer vision community.

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Vision-Based Offline-Online Perception Paradigm for Autonomous Driving

The detection of small road hazards, such as lost cargo, is a vital capability for self-driving cars. We tackle this challenging and rarely addressed problem with a vision system that leverages appearance, contextual as well as geometric cues. To utilize the appearance and contextual cues, we propose a new deep learning-based obstacle detection framework. Here a variant of a fully convolutional network is proposed to predict a pixel-wise semantic labeling of (i) free-space, (ii) on-road unexpected obstacles, and (iii) background. The geometric cues are exploited using a state-of-the-art detection approach that predicts obstacles from stereo input images via model-based statistical hypothesis tests. We present a principled Bayesian framework to fuse the semantic and stereo-based detection results. The mid-level Stixel representation is used to describe obstacles in a flexible, compact and robust manner. We evaluate our new obstacle detection system on the Lost and Found dataset, which includes very challenging scenes with obstacles of only 5 cm height. Overall, we report a major improvement over the state-of-the-art, with a performance gain of 27.4%. In particular, we achieve a detection rate of over 90% for distances of up to 50 m. Our system operates at 22 Hz on our self-driving platform.

Sebastian Ramos

Papers

The Cityscapes Dataset for Semantic Urban Scene Understanding

The Cityscapes Dataset for Semantic Urban Scene Understanding

The Cityscapes Dataset

Vision-Based Offline-Online Perception Paradigm for Autonomous Driving

Detecting unexpected obstacles for self-driving cars: Fusing deep learning and geometric modeling