Boosting Semantic Segmentation by Conditioning the Backbone with Semantic Boundaries

In this paper, we propose the Semantic-Boundary-Conditioned Backbone (SBCB) framework, an effective approach to enhancing semantic segmentation performance, particularly around mask boundaries, while maintaining compatibility with various segmentation architectures. Our objective is to improve existing models by leveraging semantic boundary information as an auxiliary task. The SBCB framework incorporates a complementary semantic boundary detection (SBD) task with a multi-task learning approach. It enhances the segmentation backbone without introducing additional parameters during inference or relying on independent post-processing modules. The SBD head utilizes multi-scale features from the backbone, learning low-level features in early stages and understanding high-level semantics in later stages. This complements common semantic segmentation architectures, where features from later stages are used for classification. Extensive evaluations using popular segmentation heads and backbones demonstrate the effectiveness of the SBCB. It leads to an average improvement of 1.2% in IoU and a 2.6% gain in the boundary F-score on the Cityscapes dataset. The SBCB framework also improves over- and under-segmentation characteristics. Furthermore, the SBCB adapts well to customized backbones and emerging vision transformer models, consistently achieving superior performance. In summary, the SBCB framework significantly boosts segmentation performance, especially around boundaries, without introducing complexity to the models. Leveraging the SBD task as an auxiliary objective, our approach demonstrates consistent improvements on various benchmarks, confirming its potential for advancing the field of semantic segmentation.