A deep learning-based and adaptive region proposal algorithm for semantic segmentation

Abstract

This paper presents an adaptive and new region proposal algorithm for generating high-quality regions. The main aim of this algorithm is to investigate different features in the proposal generation process. This algorithm is based on bottom-up image segmentation and deep learning techniques. Each primary region is represented by features derived from a convolutional neural network (CNN). The adjacent and similar regions are merged based on a new proposed searching algorithm and a distance function in a hierarchical way. Additionally, various hand-crafted texture features are examined for representing each region. These texture features are not being utilized previously in region proposal generation. This method also applied both texture-based and deep learning-based features, contemporaneously. Furthermore, the proposed region proposal algorithm was evaluated on two significant challenging datasets, including VOC2012 and COCO2017. The resulting proposals show more high-quality regions in high overlaps in comparison to previous region proposal algorithms. More importantly, the results verified that the deep learning-based features together with handcrafted texture features are complement and this fusion can overcome the shortcoming of other approaches. Additionally, the proposed region proposal algorithm is employed in weakly supervised semantic segmentation. The new generated proposals are used to create some new labeled masks. These masks are very useful and effective in the training phase of deep learning. This approach is evaluated on VOC2012 and compared with previous region-based and free region-based methods. The results show the efficacy of the proposed method.