January 2020
tl;dr: Find most uncertain points in segmentation and use both coarse RoI feature map and fine feature map to predict results.
Overall impression
The paper tells a great story about borrowing ideas from rendering to segmentation. However the idea of coarse-to-fine has been explored extensively before. The main novelty of this paper is how to save computation by non-uniform sampling.
A regular grid will invariably oversample the smooth areas while simultaneously undersample object boundaries. For semantic segmentation, we use feature map of 1/8 size of input. Or 28x28 for instance segmentation.
PointRend is a module that can be incorporated in instance/semantic segmentation frameworks to improve results.
Key ideas
- PointRend has 3 main components: 1) point selection strategy; 2) point-wise feature representation 3) point head to predict a label.
- Sampling strategy varies from training to inference.
- Inference: iterative process.
- Bilinear upsample prediction
- Find most uncertain N points (with prob ~0.5)
- Bilinear sample from fine feature map (FPN-P2) and coarse feature map (7x7 Mask RCNN-like head)
- MLP based on concatenated features to predict K-classes.
- Training
- Over generation: generates KN (K>1). K = 3
- Importance sampling: pick bN (b<1) most uncertain points. b = 0.75
- Coverage: uniform sample (1-b) N for the rest of the points.
Technical details
- This method is reminiscent of Hypercolumn to improve semantic segmentation.
Notes