A Classification Refinement Strategy for Semantic Segmentation

Based on the observation that semantic segmentation errors are partially predictable, we propose a compact formulation using confusion statistics of the trained classifier to refine (re-estimate) the initial pixel label hypotheses. The proposed strategy is contingent upon computing the classifier confusion probabilities for a given dataset and estimating a relevant prior on the object classes present in the image to be classified. We provide a procedure to robustly estimate the confusion probabilities and explore multiple prior definitions. Experiments are shown comparing performances on multiple challenging datasets using different priors to improve a state-of-the-art semantic segmentation classifier. This study demonstrates the potential to significantly improve semantic labeling and motivates future work for reliable label prior estimation from images.

James W. Davis, Christopher Menart, Muhammad Akbar, Roman Ilin · 2018