Multi-scale bidirectional FCN for object skeleton extraction

Abstract

Object skeleton detection is a challenging problem with wide application. Recently, deep Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) have substantially improved the performance of the state-of-the-art in this task. However, most of the existing CNN-Based methods are based on a skip-layer structure where low-level and high-level features are combined and learned so as to gather multi-level contextual information. As shallow features are too messy and lack semantic knowledge, they may cause errors and inaccuracy. Therefore, we propose a novel network architecture, Multi-Scale Bidirectional Fully Convolutional Network (MSB-FCN), to better capture and consolidate multi-scale high-level context information for object skeleton detection. Our network uses only deep features to build multi-scale feature representations, and employs a bidirectional structure to collect contextual knowledge. Hence the proposed MSB-FCN has the ability to learn the semantic-level information from different sub-regions. Furthermore, we introduce dense connections into the bidirectional structure of our MSB-FCN to ensure that the learning process at each scale can directly encode information from all other scales. Extensive experiments on various commonly used benchmarks demonstrate that the proposed MSB-FCN has achieved significant improvements over the state-of-the-art algorithms.