Semantic road segmentation via multi-scale ensembles of learned features

  • Authors:
  • Jose M. Alvarez;Yann LeCun;Theo Gevers;Antonio M. Lopez

  • Affiliations:
  • Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, New York University, New York, NY, USA, Computer Vision Center, Univ. Autònoma de Barcelona, Barcelona, Spain;Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, New York University, New York, NY;Faculty of Science, University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands, Computer Vision Center, Univ. Autònoma de Barcelona, Barcelona, Spain;Computer Vision Center, Univ. Autònoma de Barcelona, Barcelona, Spain

  • Venue:
  • ECCV'12 Proceedings of the 12th international conference on Computer Vision - Volume 2
  • Year:
  • 2012

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Abstract

Semantic segmentation refers to the process of assigning an object label (e.g., building, road, sidewalk, car, pedestrian) to every pixel in an image. Common approaches formulate the task as a random field labeling problem modeling the interactions between labels by combining local and contextual features such as color, depth, edges, SIFT or HoG. These models are trained to maximize the likelihood of the correct classification given a training set. However, these approaches rely on hand---designed features (e.g., texture, SIFT or HoG) and a higher computational time required in the inference process. Therefore, in this paper, we focus on estimating the unary potentials of a conditional random field via ensembles of learned features. We propose an algorithm based on convolutional neural networks to learn local features from training data at different scales and resolutions. Then, diversification between these features is exploited using a weighted linear combination. Experiments on a publicly available database show the effectiveness of the proposed method to perform semantic road scene segmentation in still images. The algorithm outperforms appearance based methods and its performance is similar compared to state---of---the---art methods using other sources of information such as depth, motion or stereo.