Speeding up semantic segmentation for autonomous driving

Deep learning has considerably improved semantic image segmentation. However, its high accuracy is traded against larger computational costs which makes it unsuit-able for embedded devices in self-driving cars. We propose a novel deep network architecture for image segmentation that keeps the high accuracy while being efficient enough for embedded devices. The architecture consists of ELU activation functions, a SqueezeNet-like encoder, followed by parallel dilated convolutions, and a decoder with SharpMask-like refinement modules. On the Cityscapes dataset, the new network achieves higher segmentation accuracy than other networks that are tailored to embedded devices. Simultaneously the frame-rate is still sufficiently high for the deployment in autonomous vehicles.