Incremental and multi-task learning strategies for coarse-to-fine semantic segmentation

Mazen Mel

Abstract: The semantic understanding of a scene is a key problem in the computer vision field. In this work, we address the multi-level semantic segmentation task where a deep neural network is first trained to recognize an initial, coarse, set of a few classes. Then, in an incremental-like approach, it is adapted to segment and label new objects’ categories hierarchically derived from subdividing the classes of the initial set. We propose a set of strategies where the output of coarse classifiers is fed to the architectures performing the finer classification. Furthermore, we investigate the possibility to predict the different levels of semantic understanding together, which also helps achieve higher accuracy. Experimental results on the New York University Depth v2 (NYUDv2) dataset show promising insights on the multi-level scene understanding.