State of the Art Techniques to Advance Deep Networks for Semantic Segmentation

In recent times, the computer vision community has seen remarkable growth in the field of scene understanding. With such a wide prevalence of images, the importance of this field is growing rapidly along with the technologies involved in it. Semantic Segmentation is an important step in scene understanding which requires the assignment of each pixel in an image to a pre-defined class and achieving 100% accuracy is a challenging task, thereby making it an active research topic among researchers. In this paper, an extensive study and review of the existing Deep Learning (DL) based techniques used for Semantic Segmentation is carried out along with a summary of the datasets and evaluation metrics used for it. The study involved the meticulous selection of relevant research papers in the field of interest by search based on several defined keywords. The study begins with a general and broader focus on Semantic Segmentation as a problem and further narrows its focus on existing Deep Learning (DL) based approaches for this task. In addition to this, a summary of the traditional methods used for Semantic Segmentation is also presented. The contents of this study are organized to provide ease of access to the relevant literature available for the problem of Semantic Segmentation, with a concentrated focus on DL-based methods. Since the problem of scene understanding is being vastly explored by the computer vision community, especially with the help of Semantic Segmentation, we believe that this study will benefit active researchers in reviewing and studying the existing state-of-the-art, as well as advanced methods for the same.