Distributed Semantic Segmentation with Efficient Joint Source and Task Decoding

Distributed computing in the context of deep neural networks (DNNs) implies the execution of one part of the network on edge devices and the other part typically on a large-scale cloud platform. Conventional methods propose to employ a serial concatenation of a learned image and source encoder, the latter projecting the image encoder output (bottleneck features) into a quantized representation for bitrate-efficient transmission. In the cloud, a respective source decoder reprojects the quantized representation to the original feature representation, serving as an input for the downstream task decoder performing, e.g., semantic segmentation. In this work, we propose joint source and task decoding, as it allows for a smaller network size in the cloud. This further enables the scalability of such services in large numbers without requiring extensive computational load on the cloud per channel. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method by achieving a distributed semantic segmentation SOTA over a wide range of bitrates on the mean intersection over union metric, while using only $9.8 \%$ ... $11.59 \%$ of cloud DNN parameters used in the previous SOTA on the COCO and Cityscapes datasets.

SemAttNet: Towards Attention-based Semantic Aware Guided Depth Completion

Depth completion involves recovering a dense depth map from a sparse map and an RGB image. Recent approaches focus on utilizing color images as guidance images to recover depth at invalid pixels. However, color images alone are not enough to provide the necessary semantic understanding of the scene. Consequently, the depth completion task suffers from sudden illumination changes in RGB images (e.g., shadows). In this paper, we propose a novel three-branch backbone comprising color-guided, semantic-guided, and depth-guided branches. Specifically, the color-guided branch takes a sparse depth map and RGB image as an input and generates color depth which includes color cues (e.g., object boundaries) of the scene. The predicted dense depth map of color-guided branch along-with semantic image and sparse depth map is passed as input to semantic-guided branch for estimating semantic depth. The depth-guided branch takes sparse, color, and semantic depths to generate the dense depth map. The color depth, semantic depth, and guided depth are adaptively fused to produce the output of our proposed three-branch backbone. In addition, we also propose to apply semantic-aware multi-modal attention-based fusion block (SAMMAFB) to fuse features between all three branches. We further use CSPN++ with Atrous convolutions to refine the dense depth map produced by our three-branch backbone. Extensive experiments show that our model achieves state-of-the-art performance in the KITTI depth completion benchmark at the time of submission.