Novel Method of Semantic Segmentation Applicable to Augmented Reality

Sensors (Basel). 2020 Mar 20;20(6):1737. doi: 10.3390/s20061737.

Abstract

This paper proposes a novel method of semantic segmentation, consisting of modified dilated residual network, atrous pyramid pooling module, and backpropagation, that is applicable to augmented reality (AR). In the proposed method, the modified dilated residual network extracts a feature map from the original images and maintains spatial information. The atrous pyramid pooling module places convolutions in parallel and layers feature maps in a pyramid shape to extract objects occupying small areas in the image; these are converted into one channel using a 1 × 1 convolution. Backpropagation compares the semantic segmentation obtained through convolution from the final feature map with the ground truth provided by a database. Losses can be reduced by applying backpropagation to the modified dilated residual network to change the weighting. The proposed method was compared with other methods on the Cityscapes and PASCAL VOC 2012 databases. The proposed method achieved accuracies of 82.8 and 89.8 mean intersection over union (mIOU) and frame rates of 61 and 64.3 frames per second (fps) for the Cityscapes and PASCAL VOC 2012 databases, respectively. These results prove the applicability of the proposed method for implementing natural AR applications at actual speeds because the frame rate is greater than 60 fps.

Keywords: atrous pyramid pooling module; augmented reality; backpropagation; convolutional neural network; fully convolutional network; modified dilated residual network; semantic segmentation.