A Hierarchical Feature Extraction Network for Fast Scene Segmentation

Semantic segmentation is one of the most active research topics in computer vision with the goal to assign dense semantic labels for all pixels in a given image. In this paper, we introduce HFEN (Hierarchical Feature Extraction Network), a lightweight network to reach a balance between inference speed and segmentation accuracy. Our architecture is based on an encoder-decoder framework. The input images are down-sampled through an efficient encoder to extract multi-layer features. Then the extracted features are fused via a decoder, where the global contextual information and spatial information are aggregated for final segmentations with real-time performance. Extensive experiments have been conducted on two standard benchmarks, Cityscapes and Camvid, where our network achieved superior performance on NVIDIA 2080Ti.