Scene Parsing via Integrated Classification Model and Variance-Based Regularization

Scene Parsing is a challenging task in computer vision, which can be formulated as a pixel-wise classification problem. Existing deep-learning-based methods usually use one general classifier to recognize all object categories. However, the general classifier easily makes some mistakes in dealing with some confusing categories that share similar appearances or semantics. In this paper, we propose an integrated classification model and a variance-based regularization to achieve more accurate classifications. On the one hand, the integrated classification model contains multiple classifiers, not only the general classifier but also a refinement classifier to distinguish the confusing categories. On the other hand, the variance-based regularization differentiates the scores of all categories as large as possible to reduce misclassifications. Specifically, the integrated classification model includes three steps. The first is to extract the features of each pixel. Based on the features, the second step is to classify each pixel across all categories to generate a preliminary classification result. In the third step, we leverage a refinement classifier to refine the classification result, focusing on differentiating the high-preliminary-score categories. An integrated loss with the variance-based regularization is used to train the model. Extensive experiments on three common scene parsing datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.