Cross-view Semantic Segmentation for Sensing Surroundings

Sensing surroundings is ubiquitous and effortless to humans: It takes a single glance to extract the spatial configuration of objects and the free space from the scene. To help machine vision with spatial understanding capabilities, we introduce the View Parsing Network (VPN) for cross-view semantic segmentation. In this framework, the first-view observations are parsed into a top-down-view semantic map indicating precise object locations. VPN contains a view transformer module, designed to aggregate the first-view observations taken from multiple angles and modalities, in order to draw a bird-view semantic map. We evaluate the VPN framework for cross-view segmentation on two types of environments, indoors and driving-traffic scenes. Experimental results show that our model accurately predicts the top-down-view semantic mask of the visible objects from the first-view observations, as well as infer the location of contextually-relevant objects even if they are invisible.