Partial Class Activation Attention for Semantic Segmentation

Current attention-based methods for semantic segmentation mainly model pixel relation through pairwise affinity and coarse segmentation. For the first time, this paper explores modeling pixel relation via Class Activation Map (CAM). Beyond the previous CAM generated from image-level classification, we present Partial CAM, which sub-divides the task into region-level prediction and achieves better localization performance. In order to eliminate the intra-class inconsistency caused by the variances of local context, we further propose Partial Class Activation Attention (PCAA) that simultaneously utilizes local and global class-level representations for attention calculation. Once obtained the partial CAM, PCAA collects local class centers and computes pixel-to-class relation locally. Applying local-specific representations ensures reliable results under different local contexts. To guarantee global consistency, we gather global representations from all local class centers and conduct feature aggregation. Experimental results confirm that Partial CAM outperforms the previous two strategies as pixel relation. Notably, our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on several challenging benchmarks including Cityscapes, Pascal Context, and ADE20K. Code is available at https://github.com/lsa1997/PCAA.