Chapter 12 - Semantic scene segmentation for robotics

Abstract

Comprehensive scene understanding is a critical enabler of robot autonomy. Semantic segmentation is one of the key scene understanding tasks, which is pivotal for several robotics applications including autonomous driving, domestic service robotics, last mile delivery, among many others. Semantic segmentation is a dense prediction task that aims to provide a scene representation in which each pixel of an image is assigned a semantic class label. Therefore semantic segmentation considers the full scene context, incorporating the object category, location, and shape of all the scene elements, including the background. Numerous algorithms have been proposed for semantic segmentation over the years. However, the recent advances in deep learning combined with the boost in the computational capacity and the availability of large-scale labeled data sets have led to significant advances in semantic segmentation. In this chapter, we introduce the task of semantic segmentation and present the deep learning techniques that have been proposed to address this task over the years. We first define the task of semantic segmentation and contrast it with other closely related scene understanding problems. We detail different algorithms and architectures for semantic segmentation and the commonly employed loss functions. Furthermore, we present an overview of data sets, benchmarks, and metrics that are used in semantic segmentation. We conclude the chapter with a discussion of challenges and opportunities for further research in this area.