This journal paper and its 2015 conference paper is to propose a solution for semantic segmentation, i.e., classification of pixels on an image to objects. It is more refined than a bounding box. The paper proposed a solution that involves only convolutional layers but not fully connected layers so that spatial information is preserved throughout the network.

## Fully Convolutional Networks

Convolutional layers are translation invariant. Input and output are arrays of size $$h\times w\times d$$ which $$h$$ and $$w$$ are spatial dimensions and $$d$$ is the feature of channel dimension. A convolutional layer of kernel size $$k$$ and stride $$s$$ can be modeled as a function

$y_{ij} = f_{ks}(\{x_{si+\delta i,sj+\delta j\}_{0\le\delta i,\delta j<k})$

which this form is maintained under composition,

$f_{ks}\circ g_{k's'} = (f\circ g)_{k'+(k-1)s',ss'}$

and therefore, stack of convolutional layers (i.e., fully convolutional network) is a deep nonlinear filter.

Furthermore, if the loss function is sum over the spatial dimensions of the output array, the gradient is also a sum over the gradients of each spatial components. Thus we can consider the receptive fields of each spatial component at the output as a mini-batch.

Classification networks such as AlexNet takes fixed-size input and produce non-spatial outputs. With fully convolutional network, arbitrary sized input can be taken.

This paper proposed a model using upsampling layer or deconvolution layer to produce output that match the size of input. Essentially it is just a convolutional layer (with trainable filter) with factional input stride, i.e., dilation on the input tensor by inserting zeros while the kernel is not dilated. The segmentation is achieved using per-pixel classification. The network is trained with per-pixel softmax loss and evaluated with mean pixel IoU over all classes, including background, but excluding pixels that are masked out.

## FCN-VGG16 for Classification

The paper considered AlexNet, VGG-16, and GoogLeNet backbones and found VGG-16 achieved the best IoU (also the slowest inference and most parameters, at 134M).

First, the paper convert VGG-16 into a classification model with fully convolutional networks. It is a conversion that can bring the pretrained VGG-16 weight into the new model.

The VGG-16 starts with a sequence of convolutional and pooling layers. Then after 5 blocks, the output is flattened and passed through 2 hidden dense layers and an output dense layer for 1000-way softmax. The conversion decapitated the VGG-16 network right before the flattening, and replaced the three dense layers with three conv layers (of kernel 7×7, 1×1, and 1×1, all with stride 1), and two dropout layers in between them. The weights will be the same: The three replaced dense layers at VGG-16 are having weights 25088×4096, 4096×4096, and 4096×1000 respectively. These weights are merely reshaped into 7×7×512×4096 (because the max pooling output from the preceding layer has 512 channels), 1×1×4096×4096, and 1×1×4096×1000. The first two conv layers are using ReLU activation while the last one is softmax.

Such network can accept image of any size. But the output shape would depend on the input shape. Classification can be based on one of the patch in the output (e.g., the one at the center in spatial dimensions).

## FCN-VGG16 for Segmentation

Since the modified VGG-16 network is producing classification on a spatial tensor, segmentation needs only to map the classification tensor back to each pixel. The output tensor usually has coarser resolution than the input. We need to upsample them.

Firstly, the FCN-VGG16 for ImageNet classification has 1000-way softmax while the segmentation dataset for PASCAL VOC has only 20 foreground classes and 1 background class. Thus the final convolutional layer is replaced to 21 channels (i.e., the weight tensor of shape 1×1×4096×21). And this layer is using linear activation.

Then, to convert the feature map from this 1x1 conv layer back to pixels, an transposed convolutional layer (aka deconvolution layer) is used. In such FCN-VGG16 model, the output receptive field is 32×32, hence the transposed convolution layer has stride of 32×32, to map the classification from each coarse location to pixels using bilinear upsampling.

The training runs for 175 epochs, with 20 images per batch, and learning rate of 1e-4, momentum 0.9, weight decay 0.0016 or 0.0625. Loss metric are not normalized, which each pixel has the same weight.

## Skip connections

To improve segmentation quality, skip connections are added to fuse layer outputs from shallower layers with finer strides.

Consider the modification of FCN-VGG16 for segmentation, the output of VGG-16 is modified to create 21-way classification with a 1×1 conv layer, then it is upsampled to the original image size with one deconvolution layer. In VGG-16, there are 5 blocks of convolutional layers, each with 2 conv and 1 max pooling. The spatial size is reduced in each block.

The previous segmentation model applied 1×1 conv on the output of the 5th block, then upsample to the input image size. Instead, we can upsample that to the size of the output of 4th block, and also apply 1×1 conv on the output of 4th block, then add these two outputs together, then upsample again to the input image size.

This process can repeat for each block, but the paper stopped at 2 skip connections using the output of 3 blocks. It upsample the added output from block 5 and block 4 to the size of block 3 and add the 1x1 conv output of block 3, then upsample again to the input image size.

Essentially, this means the output from different scales (5th, 4th, and 3rd block) are sumed up before the semantic segmentation computation.

Based on the size of the receptive field (strides) at the final upsampling layer, the paper call them FCN32 (the one without skip connections), FCN16, and FCN8.

The paper found that FCN32 gives mean IOU score at 52, but FCN16 gives 65 while FCN8 brings it up to 65.5.

## Bibliographic data

@article{
title = "Fully Convolutional Networks for Semantic Segmentation",
author = "Evan Shelhamer and Jonathan Long and Trevor Darrell",
journal = "IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence",
volume = "39",
number = "4",
pages = "640--651",
month = "Apr",
year = "2017",
note = "also in Proc CVPR 2015, arXiv:1411.4038, and arXiv:1605.06211",
}