Efficient Semantic Segmentation using Gradual Grouping

Abstract

Deep CNNs for semantic segmentation have high memory and run time requirements. Various approaches have been proposed to make CNNs efficient like grouped, shuffled, depth-wise separable convolutions. We study the effectiveness of these techniques on a real-time semantic segmentation architecture like ERFNet for improving run time by over 5X. We apply these techniques to CNN layers partially or fully and evaluate the testing accuracies on Cityscapes dataset. We obtain accuracy vs parameters/FLOPs trade offs, giving accuracy scores for models that can run under specified runtime budgets. We further propose a novel training procedure which starts out with a dense convolution but gradually evolves towards a grouped convolution. We show that our proposed training method and efficient architecture design can improve accuracies by over 8% with depth wise separable convolutions applied on the encoder of ERFNet and attaching a light weight decoder. This results in a model which has a 5X improvement in FLOPs while only suffering a 4% degradation in accuracy with respect to ERFNet.

arXiv commentCVPR 2018 Workshop paper

References in corpus (10)

• Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization
• MobileNets: Efficient Convolutional Neural Networks for Mobile Vision Applications
• Neural Architecture Search with Reinforcement Learning
• ENet: A Deep Neural Network Architecture for Real-Time Semantic Segmentation
• The Cityscapes Dataset for Semantic Urban Scene Understanding
• Efficient Neural Architecture Search via Parameter Sharing
• Speeding up Convolutional Neural Networks with Low Rank Expansions
• Speeding-up Convolutional Neural Networks Using Fine-tuned CP-Decomposition
• ICNet for Real-Time Semantic Segmentation on High-Resolution Images
• CondenseNet: An Efficient DenseNet using Learned Group Convolutions