Context-aware Padding for Semantic Segmentation

Zero padding is widely used in convolutional neural networks to prevent the size of feature maps diminishing too fast. However, it has been claimed to disturb the statistics at the border. As an alternative, we propose a context-aware (CA) padding approach to extend the image. We reformulate the padding problem as an image extrapolation problem and illustrate the effects on the semantic segmentation task. Using context-aware padding, the ResNet-based segmentation model achieves higher mean Intersection-Over-Union than the traditional zero padding on the Cityscapes and the dataset of DeepGlobe satellite imaging challenge. Furthermore, our padding does not bring noticeable overhead during training and testing.

An Analysis of Human-centered Geolocation

Online social networks contain a constantly increasing amount of images - most of them focusing on people. Due to cultural and climate factors, fashion trends and physical appearance of individuals differ from city to city. In this paper we investigate to what extent such cues can be exploited in order to infer the geographic location, i.e. the city, where a picture was taken. We conduct a user study, as well as an evaluation of automatic methods based on convolutional neural networks. Experiments on the Fashion 144k and a Pinterest-based dataset show that the automatic methods succeed at this task to a reasonable extent. As a matter of fact, our empirical results suggest that automatic methods can surpass human performance by a large margin. Further inspection of the trained models shows that human-centered characteristics, like clothing style, physical features, and accessories, are informative for the task at hand. Moreover, it reveals that also contextual features, e.g. wall type, natural environment, etc., are taken into account by the automatic methods.

Error Correction for Dense Semantic Image Labeling

Pixelwise semantic image labeling is an important, yet challenging, task with many applications. Typical approaches to tackle this problem involve either the training of deep networks on vast amounts of images to directly infer the labels or the use of probabilistic graphical models to jointly model the dependencies of the input (i.e. images) and output (i.e. labels). Yet, the former approaches do not capture the structure of the output labels, which is crucial for the performance of dense labeling, and the latter rely on carefully hand-designed priors that require costly parameter tuning via optimization techniques, which in turn leads to long inference times. To alleviate these restrictions, we explore how to arrive at dense semantic pixel labels given both the input image and an initial estimate of the output labels. We propose a parallel architecture that: 1) exploits the context information through a LabelPropagation network to propagate correct labels from nearby pixels to improve the object boundaries, 2) uses a LabelReplacement network to directly replace possibly erroneous, initial labels with new ones, and 3) combines the different intermediate results via a Fusion network to obtain the final per-pixel label. We experimentally validate our approach on two different datasets for the semantic segmentation and face parsing tasks respectively, where we show improvements over the state-of-the-art. We also provide both a quantitative and qualitative analysis of the generated results.