Multi-Resolution Learning and Semantic Edge Enhancement for Super-Resolution Semantic Segmentation of Urban Scene Images

Super-resolution semantic segmentation (SRSS) is a technique that aims to obtain high-resolution semantic segmentation results based on resolution-reduced input images. SRSS can significantly reduce computational cost and enable efficient, high-resolution semantic segmentation on mobile devices with limited resources. Some of the existing methods require modifications of the original semantic segmentation network structure or add additional and complicated processing modules, which limits the flexibility of actual deployment. Furthermore, the lack of detailed information in the low-resolution input image renders existing methods susceptible to misdetection at the semantic edges. To address the above problems, we propose a simple but effective framework called multi-resolution learning and semantic edge enhancement-based super-resolution semantic segmentation (MS-SRSS) which can be applied to any existing encoder-decoder based semantic segmentation network. Specifically, a multi-resolution learning mechanism (MRL) is proposed that enables the feature encoder of the semantic segmentation network to improve its feature extraction ability. Furthermore, we introduce a semantic edge enhancement loss (SEE) to alleviate the false detection at the semantic edges. We conduct extensive experiments on the three challenging benchmarks, Cityscapes, Pascal Context, and Pascal VOC 2012, to verify the effectiveness of our proposed MS-SRSS method. The experimental results show that, compared with the existing methods, our method can obtain the new state-of-the-art semantic segmentation performance.