STFCN: Spatio-Temporal Fully Convolutional Neural Network for Semantic Segmentation of Street Scenes

Abstract

This paper presents a novel method to involve both spatial and temporal features for semantic segmentation of street scenes. Current work on convolutional neural networks (CNNs) has shown that CNNs provide advanced spatial features supporting a very good performance of solutions for the semantic segmentation task. We investigate how involving temporal features also has a good effect on segmenting video data. We propose a module based on a long short-term memory (LSTM) architecture of a recurrent neural network for interpreting the temporal characteristics of video frames over time. Our system takes as input frames of a video and produces a correspondingly-sized output; for segmenting the video our method combines the use of three components: First, the regional spatial features of frames are extracted using a CNN; then, using LSTM the temporal features are added; finally, by deconvolving the spatio-temporal features we produce pixel-wise predictions. Our key insight is to build spatio-temporal convolutional networks (spatio-temporal CNNs) that have an end-to-end architecture for semantic video segmentation. We adapted fully some known convolutional network architectures (such as FCN-AlexNet and FCN-VGG16), and dilated convolution into our spatio-temporal CNNs. Our spatio-temporal CNNs achieve state-of-the-art semantic segmentation, as demonstrated for the Camvid and NYUDv2 datasets.