SeeThroughNet: Resurrection of Auxiliary Loss by Preserving Class Probability Information

Auxiliary loss is additional loss besides the main branch loss to help optimize the learning process of neural networks. In order to calculate the auxiliary loss between the feature maps of intermediate layers and the ground truth in the field of semantic segmentation, the size of each feature map must match the ground truth. In all studies using the auxiliary losses with the segmentation models, from what we have investigated, they either use a down-sampling function to reduce the size of the ground truth or use an up-sampling function to increase the size of the feature map in order to match the resolution between the feature map and the ground truth. However, in the process of selecting representative values through down-sampling and up-sampling, information loss is inevitable. In this paper, we introduce Class Probability Preserving (CPP) pooling to alleviate information loss in down-sampling the ground truth in semantic segmentation tasks. We demonstrated the superiority of the proposed method on Cityscapes, Pascal VOC, Pascal Context, and NYU-Depth-v2 datasets by using CPP pooling with auxiliary losses based on seven popular segmentation models. In addition, we propose See-Through Network (SeeThroughNet) that adopts an improved multi-scale attention-coupled decoder structure to maximize the effect of CPP pooling. SeeThroughNet shows cutting-edge results in the field of semantic understanding of urban street scenes, which ranked #1 on the Cityscapes benchmark.