Egnet: A Novel Edge Guided Network for Instance Segmentation

Edge information plays a significant role in instance segmentation. However, many instance segmentation methods directly perform pixel-wise classification via fully convolutional networks, which may ignore object edges. In this paper, we propose a novel Edge Guided Network (EGNet), which exploits edge information to improve the mask accuracy, for instance segmentation. Specifically, we propose an edge branch to extract edge information. Then, we use edge information as guidance and fuse it with mask features, in order to enrich the mask features. Furthermore, we propose a Spatial Attention (SA) module and add it to the backbone of our EGNet, enabling the network to focus more on foreground objects. In addition, we incorporate a Semantic Enhancement (SE) module into the edge branch, aiming to obtain additional global context information. Experimental results on the COCO 2017 dataset show the effectiveness of the proposed EGNet.