Feature Enhanced Projection Network for Zero-shot Semantic Segmentation

In environmental perception of autonomous driving, zero-shot semantic segmentation that can make prediction of new categories without using any labeled training samples is considered as a challenging task. One key step in this task is to transfer knowledge across categories via auxiliary semantic word embeddings. In this paper, we propose a feature enhanced projection network (FEPNet) that takes full advantage of transferred knowledge to enrich semantic representations. In FEPNet, two projection layers are added to a segmentation network so as to map features into seen (S) and unseen (U) category spaces, respectively. During training, U-space features are transferred to S-space using similarity relations to enhance the representation of seen categories. In the inference stage, the representation of unseen categories is also strengthened by incorporating features transferred from S-space. Moreover, a novel strategy is proposed to effectively alleviate prediction bias by performing segmentation independently in separate areas that contain seen and unseen categories. We conduct extensive experiments on three benchmark datasets. The experimental results show that our FEPNet achieves new state-of-the-art results compared to existing approaches.