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Semantic Segmentation in the era of Neural Networks

Sergios Karagiannakoson2019-1-25·4 mins
Convolutional Neural NetworksComputer Vision

Image segmentation is one of the fundamentals tasks in computer vision alongside with object recognition and detection. In semantic segmentation, the goal is to classify each pixel of the image in a specific category. The difference from image classification is that we do not classify the whole image in one class but each individual pixel. So, we have a set of predefined categories and we want to assign a label in each pixel of the image. And we do this assignment based on the context of the different objects in the image.

semSeg ICNet for Real-Time Semantic Segmentation on High-Resolution Images

We can see a real-world example in the above image. Each pixel of the image has been assigned to a specific label and represented by a different color. Red for people, blue for cars, green for trees etc.

It is important to mention that semantic segmentation is different from instance segmentation in which we distinguish labels for instances of the same class. In that case, the people will all had a different color.

But we do we fraking care? (by the way, if you don’t know what frak means, go binge watch Battlestar Galactica. It’s awesome). Why we need this high-detailed processing?

It turns out that semantic segmentation has many different applications. You can guess the first from the above image. Self-driving cars. Self-driving cars need to know what they see. And they need to know everything. Every damn pixel. Another popular use is of course in robotics( industrial or not). I can’t list many more. Geosensing, agriculture, medical image diagnostics, facial segmentation, fashion.

If you are convinced, let’s see how we can approach the task. It is not that difficult to figure out.

Deep Learning

It is no secret that deep neural networks revolutionize computer vision and especially image classification. From 2012 to today, it surpasses its predecessors by a big margin. It is now a fact that computers are better in image classification than humans. Inevitably then, we used the same techniques for semantic segmentation too. And did they work?

Of course, they did. Convolutional Neural Networks are now the standard in the industry for these kinds of problems. I am not going to bore you with a historic flashback of all the architectures in the field. Instead, I will present to you the state of the art, as it is appearing today .

But first let’s define our problem more specifically:

  • Each pixel of the image must be assigned to a class and colorized accordingly

  • The input and the output image should have exactly the same size

  • Each pixel on the input must correspond to a pixel in the exact same location on the output

  • We need pixel-level accuracy to distinguish between different classes.

Taken these into consideration, let’s proceed to the architecture:

Fully Convolutional Network (FCN)

Fully Convolutional networks consist of only convolutional and pooling layers, without the need fully connected. The original approach was to use a stack of same-sized convolutional layers to map the input image to the output one.

fcn1 Stanford University School of Engineering

As you may imagine it produced quite good results, but it was extremely computationally expensive. The thing was that they couldn’t use any downsampling or pooling layers as it will mess up the location of the instances. And to maintain the image resolution, they need to add many layers to learn both low-level and high-level features. Thus, it ended being quite inefficient.

To solve this problem, they proposed an encoder-decoder architecture. The encoder is a typical convolutional network such as AlexNet or ResNet[https://towardsdatascience.com/an-overview-of-resnet-and-its-variants-5281e2f56035] and the decoder consists of deconvolutional (although I don’t like the term) and up-sampling layers. The goal of downsampling steps is to capture semantic/contextual information while the goal of upsampling is to recover spatial information.

fcn2 Stanford University School of Engineering

That way, they managed to reduce significantly the time and space complexity. But also, the final result. Because the encoder reduces the image resolution, the segmentation lacks well-defined edges, meaning that the boundaries between the images are not clearly defined.

To the rescue: Skips Connections.

Skip connections bypass layers and transfer the information intact to the next layers. In our case, we use them to pass the information from early layers of the encoder to the decoder, bypassing the downsampling layers. And indeed, this helped improve the details of the segmentation with much more accurate shapes and edges.

UNet

Based on the whole encoder-decoder and skip connection concept, the idea of Fully Convolutional Network expanded to U-net. U-net introduces symmetry in the FCN by increasing the size of the decoder to match the encoder and replaces the sum operation in skip connections with a concatenation.

Due to the symmetry, we can transfer a lot more information from the downsampling layers to the upsampling ones (as there are more features maps now ), improving that way the resolution of the final output.

unet https://datascience.stackexchange.com

U-nets have originally developed for biomedical image segmentation, but they also used in a wide of different applications with many variations such as the addition of fully connected layers or residual blocks.

To fully grasp the U-net idea, let’s write some code to realize how dead-simple it is. We are going to use python and keras framework to simplify thing even more.

def unet(pretrained_weights = None,input_size = (256,256,1)):
inputs = Input(input_size)
conv1 = Conv2D(64, 3, activation = 'relu', padding = 'same', kernel_initializer = 'he_normal')(inputs)
conv1 = Conv2D(64, 3, activation = 'relu', padding = 'same', kernel_initializer = 'he_normal')(conv1)
pool1 = MaxPooling2D(pool_size=(2, 2))(conv1)
conv2 = Conv2D(128, 3, activation = 'relu', padding = 'same', kernel_initializer = 'he_normal')(pool1)
conv2 = Conv2D(128, 3, activation = 'relu', padding = 'same', kernel_initializer = 'he_normal')(conv2)
pool2 = MaxPooling2D(pool_size=(2, 2))(conv2)
conv3 = Conv2D(256, 3, activation = 'relu', padding = 'same', kernel_initializer = 'he_normal')(pool2)
conv3 = Conv2D(256, 3, activation = 'relu', padding = 'same', kernel_initializer = 'he_normal')(conv3)
pool3 = MaxPooling2D(pool_size=(2, 2))(conv3)
conv4 = Conv2D(512, 3, activation = 'relu', padding = 'same', kernel_initializer = 'he_normal')(pool3)
conv4 = Conv2D(512, 3, activation = 'relu', padding = 'same', kernel_initializer = 'he_normal')(conv4)
drop4 = Dropout(0.5)(conv4)
pool4 = MaxPooling2D(pool_size=(2, 2))(drop4)
conv5 = Conv2D(1024, 3, activation = 'relu', padding = 'same', kernel_initializer = 'he_normal')(pool4)
conv5 = Conv2D(1024, 3, activation = 'relu', padding = 'same', kernel_initializer = 'he_normal')(conv5)
drop5 = Dropout(0.5)(conv5)
up6 = Conv2D(512, 2, activation = 'relu', padding = 'same', kernel_initializer = 'he_normal')(UpSampling2D(size = (2,2))(drop5))
merge6 = concatenate([drop4,up6], axis = 3)
conv6 = Conv2D(512, 3, activation = 'relu', padding = 'same', kernel_initializer = 'he_normal')(merge6)
conv6 = Conv2D(512, 3, activation = 'relu', padding = 'same', kernel_initializer = 'he_normal')(conv6)
up7 = Conv2D(256, 2, activation = 'relu', padding = 'same', kernel_initializer = 'he_normal')(UpSampling2D(size = (2,2))(conv6))
merge7 = concatenate([conv3,up7], axis = 3)
conv7 = Conv2D(256, 3, activation = 'relu', padding = 'same', kernel_initializer = 'he_normal')(merge7)
conv7 = Conv2D(256, 3, activation = 'relu', padding = 'same', kernel_initializer = 'he_normal')(conv7)
up8 = Conv2D(128, 2, activation = 'relu', padding = 'same', kernel_initializer = 'he_normal')(UpSampling2D(size = (2,2))(conv7))
merge8 = concatenate([conv2,up8], axis = 3)
conv8 = Conv2D(128, 3, activation = 'relu', padding = 'same', kernel_initializer = 'he_normal')(merge8)
conv8 = Conv2D(128, 3, activation = 'relu', padding = 'same', kernel_initializer = 'he_normal')(conv8)
up9 = Conv2D(64, 2, activation = 'relu', padding = 'same', kernel_initializer = 'he_normal')(UpSampling2D(size = (2,2))(conv8))
merge9 = concatenate([conv1,up9], axis = 3)
conv9 = Conv2D(64, 3, activation = 'relu', padding = 'same', kernel_initializer = 'he_normal')(merge9)
conv9 = Conv2D(64, 3, activation = 'relu', padding = 'same', kernel_initializer = 'he_normal')(conv9)
conv9 = Conv2D(2, 3, activation = 'relu', padding = 'same', kernel_initializer = 'he_normal')(conv9)
conv10 = Conv2D(1, 1, activation = 'sigmoid')(conv9)
model = Model(input = inputs, output = conv10)
model.compile(optimizer = Adam(lr = 1e-4), loss = 'binary_crossentropy', metrics = ['accuracy'])
#model.summary()
if(pretrained_weights):
model.load_weights(pretrained_weights)
return model
# the code is borrowed from zhixuhao https://github.com/zhixuhao

Do you think I am kidding? That’s it. A bunch of convolutional, pooling and upsampling layers stacked together and a few concatenations to implement the skip connections. Dead-simple or what?

Of course, we still need a lot of work to do like preprocess our input data, augment them and more importantly find them. What I mean is that gathering ground-images for our training is not an easy task at all. Just think that for every input image, we want its segmentation to find the error between them. And how can we construct the ground truth segmentations? By hand? That’s a possible way to do it. By a well- crafted script? Maybe. One thing is certain. It is not easy.

Finally, I would like to mention that there are other pretty clever ways to perform semantic segmentation but most of them are built upon the FCN and U-Net. Some of them are:

For further exploration of the depths of Semantic Segmentation with Deep Learning, there is no better way than the Advanced Computer Vision with TensorFlow course by DeepLearning.ai.

Semantic segmentation is a very active field of research due to its high importance and emergency in real-world applications, so we expect to see a lot more papers over the next years. The combination of computer vision and deep learning is highly exciting and has given us tremendous progress in complicated tasks. Do you think that Tesla autonomous cars would have driven 1 billion miles by today without Deep Learning? I personally don’t think so. Let’s see what the future holds…

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