Containment Control-Guided Boundary Information for Semantic Segmentation

Abstract

Real-time semantic segmentation is a challenging task in computer vision, especially in complex scenes. In this study, a novel three-branch semantic segmentation model is designed, aiming to effectively use boundary information to improve the accuracy of semantic segmentation. The proposed model introduces the concept of containment control in a pioneering way, which treats image interior elements as well as image boundary elements as followers and leaders in containment control, respectively. Based on this, we utilize two learnable feature fusion matrices in the high-level semantic information stage of the model to quantify the fusion process of internal and boundary features. Further, we design a dedicated loss function to update the parameters of the feature fusion matrices based on the criterion of containment control, which enables fine-grained communication between target features. In addition, our model incorporates a Feature Enhancement Unit (FEU) to tackle the challenge of maximizing the utility of multi-scale features essential for semantic segmentation tasks through the meticulous reconstruction of these features. The proposed model proves effective on the publicly available Cityscapes and CamVid datasets, achieving a trade-off between effectiveness and speed.