Tensor Low-Rank Reconstruction for Semantic Segmentation

Wanli Chen, Xinge Zhu, Ruoqi Sun, Junjun He, Ruiyu Li, Xiaoyong Shen , Bei Yu ;

Context information plays an indispensable role in the success of semantic segmentation. Recently, non-local self-attention based methods are proved to be effective for context information collection. Since desired context consists of spatial-wise and channel-wise attentions, the 3D representation is an appropriate formulation. However, these non-local methods describe 3D context information based on a 2D similarity matrix, where space compression may lead to channel-wise attention missing. An alternative is to model the contextual information directly without compression. However, this effort confronts a fundamental difficulty, namely the high-rank property of context information. In this paper, we propose a new approach to model the 3D context representations,which not only avoids the space compression, but also tackles the high-rank difficulty. Here, inspired by tensor canonical-polyadic decomposition theory (i.e, a high-rank tensor can be expressed as a combination of rank-1 tensors.), we design a low-rank-to-high-rank con-text reconstruction framework (i.e., RecoNet). Specifically, we first introduce the tensor generation module (TGM), which generates a number of rank-1 tensors to capture fragments of context feature. Then we use these rank-1 tensors to recover the high-rank context features through our proposed tensor reconstruction module (TRM). Extensive experiments show that our method achieves state-of-the-art on various public datasets. Additionally, our proposed method has more than 100 times less computational cost compared with conventional non-local-based methods."