Progressive Feature Learning for Facade Parsing With Occlusions

IEEE Trans Image Process. 2022:31:2081-2093. doi: 10.1109/TIP.2022.3152004. Epub 2022 Feb 28.

Abstract

Existing deep models for facade parsing often fail in classifying pixels in heavily occluded regions of facade images due to the difficulty in feature representation of these pixels. In this paper, we solve facade parsing with occlusions by progressive feature learning. To this end, we locate the regions contaminated by occlusions via Bayesian uncertainty evaluation on categorizing each pixel in these regions. Then, guided by the uncertainty, we propose an occlusion-immune facade parsing architecture in which we progressively re-express the features of pixels in each contaminated region from easy to hard. Specifically, the outside pixels, which have reliable context from visible areas, are re-expressed at early stages; the inner pixels are processed at late stages when their surroundings have been decontaminated at the earlier stages. In addition, at each stage, instead of using regular square convolution kernels, we design a context enhancement module (CEM) with directional strip kernels, which can aggregate structural context to re-express facade pixels. Extensive experiments on popular facade datasets demonstrate that the proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performance.