Part-Aware Context Network for Human Parsing

Recent works have made significant progress in human parsing by exploiting rich contexts. However, human parsing still faces a challenge of how to generate adaptive contextual features for the various sizes and shapes of human parts. In this work, we propose a Part-aware Context Network (PCNet), a novel and effective algorithm to deal with the challenge. PCNet mainly consists of three modules, including a part class module, a relational aggregation module, and a relational dispersion module. The part class module extracts the high-level representations of every human part from a categorical perspective. We design a relational aggregation module to capture the representative global context by mining associated semantics of human parts, which adaptively augments the context for human parts. We propose a relational dispersion module to generate the discriminative and effective local context and neglect disturbing one by making the affinity of human parts dispersed. The relational dispersion module ensures that features in the same class will be close to each other and away from those of different classes. By fusing the outputs of the relational aggregation module, the relational dispersion module and the backbone network, our PCNet generates adaptive contextual features for various sizes of human parts, improving the parsing accuracy. We achieve a new state-of-the-art segmentation performance on three challenging human parsing datasets, i.e., PASCAL-Person-Part, LIP, and CIHP.