A dense multi-scale context and asymmetric pooling embedding network for smoke segmentation

It is very challenging to accurately segment smoke images because smoke has some adverse vision characteristics, such as anomalous shapes, blurred edges, and translucency. Existing methods cannot fully focus on the texture details of anomalous shapes and blurred edges simultaneously. To solve these problems, a Dense Multi-scale context and Asymmetric pooling Embedding Network (DMAENet) is proposed to model the smoke edge details and anomalous shapes for smoke segmentation. To capture the feature information from different scales, a Dense Multi-scale Context Module (DMCM) is proposed to further enhance the feature representation capability of our network under the help of asymmetric convolutions. To efficiently extract features for long-shaped objects, the authors use asymmetric pooling to propose an Asymmetric Pooling Enhancement Module (APEM). The vertical and horizontal pooling methods are responsible for enhancing features of irregular objects. Finally, a Feature Fusion Module (FFM) is designed, which accepts three inputs for improving performance. Low and high-level features are fused by pixel-wise summing, and then the summed feature maps are further enhanced in an attention manner. Experimental results on synthetic and real smoke datasets validate that all these modules can improve performance, and the proposed DMAENet obviously outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods.