Deep Markov Clustering for Panoptic Segmentation

Abstract

Panoptic segmentation is a challenging scene understanding task that unifies semantic segmentation and instance segmentation. Namely, each pixel of an image is assigned a semantic label and an instance id. Existing works have elaborated end-to-end panoptic segmentation networks and made great progress in non-proposal-based methods. In this work, we adopt a box-free strategy and incorporate a graph-based clustering method to merge repetitive kernel weights for object instances. An alternative graph-based clustering algorithm like Markov clustering performs effective random walks for unsupervised clustering without pre-defined cluster numbers. Our proposed deep Markov clustering scheme provides an efficient alternative to guarantee instance-aware label prediction in both training and inference stages. On the COCO dataset, our method achieves promising accuracy (PQ=42.1), which is comparable with state-of-the-art methods.