TGV Upsampling: A Making-Up Operation for Semantic Segmentation

With the widespread use of deep learning methods, semantic segmentation has achieved great improvements in recent years. However, many researchers have pointed out that with multiple uses of convolution and pooling operations, great information loss would occur in the extraction processes. To solve this problem, various operations or network architectures have been suggested to make up for the loss of information. We observed a trend in many studies to design a network as a symmetric type, with both parts representing the “encoding” and “decoding” stages. By “upsampling” operations in the “decoding” stage, feature maps are constructed in a certain way that would more or less make up for the losses in previous layers. In this paper, we focus on upsampling operations, make a detailed analysis, and compare current methods used in several famous neural networks. We also combine the knowledge on image restoration and design a new upsampled layer (or operation) named the TGV upsampling algorithm. We successfully replaced upsampling layers in the previous research with our new method. We found that our model can better preserve detailed textures and edges of feature maps and can, on average, achieve 1.4–2.3% improved accuracy compared to the original models.