RANet: Region Attention Network for Semantic Segmentation

Recent semantic segmentation methods model the relationship between pixels to construct the contextual representations. In this paper, we introduce the Region Attention Network (RANet), a novel attention network for modeling the relationship between object regions. RANet divides the image into object regions, where we select the representative information. In contrast to the previous methods, RANet configures the information pathways between the pixels in different regions, enabling the region interaction to exchange the regional context for enhancing all of the pixels in the image. We train the construction of object regions, the selection of the representative regional contents, the configuration of information pathways and the context exchange between pixels, jointly, to improve the segmentation accuracy. We extensively evaluate our method on the challenging segmentation benchmarks, demonstrating that RANet effectively helps to achieve the state-of-the-art results.