GRNet: Deep Convolutional Neural Networks based on Graph Reasoning for Semantic Segmentation

In this paper, we develop a novel deep-network architecture for semantic segmentation. In contrast to previous work that widely uses dilated convolutions, we employ the original ResNet as the backbone, and a multi-scale feature fusion module (MFFM) is introduced to extract long-range contextual information and upsample feature maps. Then, a graph reasoning module (GRM) based on graph-convolutional network (GCN) is developed to aggregate semantic information. Our graph reasoning network (GRNet) extracts global contexts of input features by modeling graph reasoning in a single framework. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach provides substantial benefits over a strong baseline and achieves superior segmentation performance on two benchmark datasets.