Title: Large Kernel Matters -- Improve Semantic Segmentation by Global Convolutional Network,
Abstract: One of recent trends [30, 31, 14] in network architec- ture design is
stacking small filters (e.g., 1x1 or 3x3) in the entire network because the
stacked small filters is more ef- ficient than a large kernel, given the same
computational complexity. However, in the field of semantic segmenta- tion,
where we need to perform dense per-pixel prediction, we find that the large
kernel (and effective receptive field) plays an important role when we have to
perform the clas- sification and localization tasks simultaneously. Following
our design principle, we propose a Global Convolutional Network to address both
the classification and localization issues for the semantic segmentation. We
also suggest a residual-based boundary refinement to further refine the ob-
ject boundaries. Our approach achieves state-of-art perfor- mance on two public
benchmarks and significantly outper- forms previous results, 82.2% (vs 80.2%)
on PASCAL VOC 2012 dataset and 76.9% (vs 71.8%) on Cityscapes dataset.