Understanding Convolution for Semantic Segmentation
  Recent advances in deep learning, especially deep convolutional neural
networks (CNNs), have led to significant improvement over previous semantic
segmentation systems. Here we show how to improve pixel-wise semantic
segmentation by manipulating convolution-related operations that are of both
theoretical and practical value. First, we design dense upsampling convolution
(DUC) to generate pixel-level prediction, which is able to capture and decode
more detailed information that is generally missing in bilinear upsampling.
Second, we propose a hybrid dilated convolution (HDC) framework in the encoding
phase. This framework 1) effectively enlarges the receptive fields (RF) of the
network to aggregate global information; 2) alleviates what we call the
"gridding issue" caused by the standard dilated convolution operation. We
evaluate our approaches thoroughly on the Cityscapes dataset, and achieve a
state-of-art result of 80.1% mIOU in the test set at the time of submission. We
also have achieved state-of-the-art overall on the KITTI road estimation
benchmark and the PASCAL VOC2012 segmentation task. Our source code can be
found at this https URL .
