DA-Res2Net: a novel Densely connected residual Attention network for image semantic segmentation

Abstract

Since scene segmentation is becoming a hot topic in the field of autonomous driving and medical image analysis, researchers are actively trying new methods to improve segmentation accuracy. At present, the main issues in image semantic segmentation are intra-class inconsistency and inter-class indistinction. From our analysis, the lack of global information as well as macroscopic discrimination on the object are the two main reasons. In this paper, we propose a Densely connected residual Attention network (DA-Res2Net) which consists of a dense residual network and channel attention guidance module to deal with these problems and improve the accuracy of image segmentation. Specifically, in order to make the extracted features equipped with stronger multi-scale characteristics, a densely connected residual network is proposed as a feature extractor. Furthermore, to improve the representativeness of each channel feature, we design a Channel-Attention-Guide module to make the model focusing on the high-level semantic features and low-level location features simultaneously. Experimental results show that the method achieves significant performance on various datasets. Compared to other state-of-the-art methods, the proposed method reaches the mean IOU accuracy of 83.2% on PASCAL VOC 2012 and 79.7% on Cityscapes dataset, respectively.