Loughborough University
Browse

Compact and fast underwater segmentation network for autonomous underwater vehicles

Download (2.59 MB)
conference contribution
posted on 2021-12-20, 11:03 authored by Jiangtao Wang, Baihua LiBaihua Li, Yang Zhou, Emanuele Rocco, Qinggang MengQinggang Meng
Reliable and real-time semantic segmentation is crucial for vision-based navigation tasks undertaken by AUVs (Autonomous Underwater Vehicles). However state-of-art deep learning segmentation networks could not be deployed on embedded devices with limited onboard resources, due to the required high computation capacity and the lack of capability to deal with poor underwater image quality. In this work we present a new deep underwater segmentation network, featured by a compact encoder and a lightweight decoder. We use only one step upsampling block to recover features maps from the encoder to significantly speed up the inference time. Furthermore, we adopt three strategies to improve the network accuracy. Firstly, in parallel with the main decoder path, we introduce a branch path to extract additional low-level features. Secondly, we use position attention module to enhance the high-level semantic information and use channel attention module to introduce extra global context as well as refine the inter-dependencies of each features. Thirdly, we proposed to use two additional auxiliary loss and smooth loss functions to better train the network, such that it will be more robust in segmenting images at varying resolutions and generating smooth boundaries. We validate our network accuracy on two different underwater segmentation datasets, a generalistic and a specialist one, and our model achieves the same level of accuracy of state-of-art networks. We also tested the network speed on different embedded platforms, and we showed it reaches real-time inference speed on both Nvidia Jetson GPU platforms TX2 and Nano, with respectively around 24 and 18 FPS (Frame Per Second). The proposed network inference is up to 27 times faster than other considered networks. Its high accuracy and speed will so pave the way for its deployment and application on AUVs systems.

Funding

EPSRC Centre for Doctoral Training in Embedded Intelligence

Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council

Find out more...

History

School

  • Science

Department

  • Computer Science

Published in

Computer Vision – ACCV 2020: 15th Asian Conference on Computer Vision, Kyoto, Japan, November 30 – December 4, 2020, Revised Selected Papers, Part III

Pages

688 - 703

Source

15th Asian Conf. on Computer Vision. ACCV’20

Publisher

Springer International Publishing

Version

  • AM (Accepted Manuscript)

Publisher statement

This book chapter was published in the book Computer Vision – ACCV 2020. The publisher's website is at https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-69535-4_42

Acceptance date

2020-09-17

Publication date

2021-02-25

Copyright date

2021

ISBN

9783030695347

ISSN

0302-9743

eISSN

1611-3349

Book series

Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS, volume 12624)

Language

  • en

Editor(s)

Hiroshi Ishikawa; Cheng-Lin Liu; Tomas Pajdla; Jianbo Shi

Location

Kyoto, Japan

Event dates

30th November 2020 - 4th December 2020

Depositor

Prof Baihua Li. Deposit date: 19 December 2021

Usage metrics

    Loughborough Publications

    Categories

    No categories selected

    Exports

    RefWorks
    BibTeX
    Ref. manager
    Endnote
    DataCite
    NLM
    DC