Semantic Instance Segmentation for Autonomous Driving

Abstract

Semantic instance segmentation remains a challenge. We propose to tackle the problem with a discriminative loss function, operating at pixel level, that encourages a convolutional network to produce a representation of the image that can easily be clustered into instances with a simple post-processing step. Our approach of combining an off-the-shelf network with a principled loss function inspired by a metric learning objective is conceptually simple and distinct from recent efforts in instance segmentation and is well-suited for real-time applications. In contrast to previous works, our method does not rely on object proposals or recurrent mechanisms and is particularly well suited for tasks with complex occlusions. A key contribution of our work is to demonstrate that such a simple setup without bells and whistles is effective and can perform on-par with more complex methods. We achieve competitive performance on the Cityscapes segmentation benchmark.