Efficient Segmentation: Learning Downsampling Near Semantic Boundaries

Title: Efficient Segmentation: Learning Downsampling Near Semantic Boundaries

Teams: Facebook

Writers: Dmitrii Marin, Zijian He, Peter Vajda, Priyam Chatterjee, Sam Tsai, Fei Yang, Yuri Boykov

Publication date: August 12, 2019

Abstract

Many automated processes such as auto-piloting rely on a good semantic segmentation as a critical component. To speed up performance, it is common to downsample the input frame. However, this comes at the cost of missed small objects and reduced accuracy at semantic boundaries. To address this problem, we propose a new content-adaptive downsampling technique that learns to favor sampling locations near semantic boundaries of target classes. Cost-performance analysis shows that our method consistently outperforms the uniform sampling improving balance between accuracy and computational efficiency. Our adaptive sampling gives segmentation with better quality of boundaries and more reliable support for smaller-size objects.