Improve SegNet with feature pyramid for road scene parsing

Road scene parsing is a common task in semantic segmentation. Its images have characteristics of containing complex scene context and differing greatly among targets of the same category from different scales. To address these problems, we propose a semantic segmentation model combined with edge detection. We extend the segmentation network with an encoder-decoder structure by adding an edge feature pyramid module, namely Edge Feature Pyramid Network (EFPNet, for short). This module uses edge detection operators to get boundary information and then combines the multiscale features to improve the ability to recognize small targets. EFPNet can make up the shortcomings of convolutional neural network features, and it helps to produce smooth segmentation. After extracting features of the encoder and decoder, EFPNet uses Euclidean distance to compare the similarity between the presentation of the encoder and the decoder, which can increase the decoder’s ability to restore from the encoder. We evaluated the proposed method on Cityscapes datasets. The experiment on Cityscapes datasets demonstrates that the accuracies are improved by 7.5% and 6.2% over the popular SegNet and ENet. And the ablation experiment validates the effectiveness of our method.