Preserving details in semantics-aware context for scene parsing

Great success of scene parsing (also known as, semantic segmentation) has been achieved with the pipeline of fully convolutional networks (FCNs). Nevertheless, there are a lot of segmentation failures caused by large similarities between local appearances. To alleviate the problem, most of existing methods attempt to improve the global view of FCNs by introducing different contextual modules. Though the reconstructed high resolution output of these methods is of rich semantics, it cannot faithfully recover the fine image details owing to lack of desired precise low-level information. To overcome the problem, we propose to improve the spatial decoding process through embedding possibly lost low-level information in a principled way. To this end, we make the following three contributions. First, we propose a semantics conformity module to make low-level features variations agnostic. Second, we introduce semantics into the conformed low level features through guidance from semantically aware features. Finally, we institute the availability of various possible contextual features at feature fusion to enrich context information. The proposed approach demonstrates competitive performance on challenging PASCAL VOC 2012, Cityscapes, and ADE20K benchmarks in comparison to the state-of-the-art methods.