UnetDVH-linear: Linear feature segmentation by dilated convolution with vertical and horizontal kernels

Abstract

Linear feature extraction is crucial for special objects in semantic segmentation networks, such as slot marking and lanes. The objects with linear characteristics have global contextual information dependency. It is very difficult to capture the complete information of these objects in semantic segmentation tasks. To improve the linear feature extraction ability of the semantic segmentation network, we propose introducing the dilated convolution with vertical and horizontal kernels (DVH) into the task of feature extraction in semantic segmentation networks. Meanwhile, we figure out the outcome if we put the different vertical and horizontal kernels on different places in the semantic segmentation networks. Our networks are trained on the basis of the SS dataset, the TuSimple lane dataset and the Massachusetts Roads dataset. These datasets consist of slot marking, lanes, and road images. The research results show that our method improves the accuracy of the slot marking segmentation of the SS dataset by 2%. Compared with other state-of-the-art methods, our UnetDVH-Linear (v1) obtains better accuracy on the TuSimple Benchmark Lane Detection Challenge with a value of 97.53%. To prove the generalization of our models, road segmentation experiments were performed on aerial images. Without data argumentation, the segmentation accuracy of our model on the Massachusetts roads dataset is 95.3%. Moreover, our models perform better than other models when training with the same loss function and experimental settings. The experiment result shows that the dilated convolution with vertical and horizontal kernels will enhance the neural network on linear feature extraction.