Context-Reinforced Semantic Segmentation

Recent efforts have shown the importance of context on deep convolutional neural network based semantic segmentation. Among others, the predicted segmentation map (p-map) itself which encodes rich high-level semantic cues (e.g. objects and layout) can be regarded as a promising source of context. In this paper, we propose a dedicated module, Context Net, to better explore the context information in p-maps. Without introducing any new supervisions, we formulate the context learning problem as a Markov Decision Process and optimize it using reinforcement learning during which the p-map and Context Net are treated as environment and agent, respectively. Through adequate explorations, the Context Net selects the information which has long-term benefit for segmentation inference. By incorporating the Context Net with a baseline segmentation scheme, we then propose a Context-reinforced Semantic Segmentation network (CiSS-Net), which is fully end-to-end trainable. Experimental results show that the learned context brings 3.9% absolute improvement on mIoU over the baseline segmentation method, and the CiSS-Net achieves the state-of-the-art segmentation performance on ADE20K, PASCAL-Context and Cityscapes.