DeepGBASS: Deep Guided Boundary-Aware Semantic Segmentation

Image semantic segmentation is ubiquitously used in scene understanding applications, such as AI Camera, which require high accuracy and efficiency. Deep learning has significantly advanced the state-of-the-art in semantic segmentation. However, many of recent semantic segmentation works only consider class accuracy and ignore the accuracies at the boundaries between semantic classes. To improve the semantic boundary accuracy, we propose low complexity Deep Guided Decoder (DGD) networks, trained with a novel Semantic Boundary-Aware Learning (SBAL) strategy. Our ablation studies on Cityscapes and the ADE20K-32 confirm the effectiveness of our approach with network of different complexities. We show that our DeepGBASS approach significantly improves the mIoU by up to 11% relative gain and the mean boundary F1-score (mBF) by up to 39.4% when training MobileNetEdgeTPU DeepLab on ADE20K-32 dataset.