Siqi Fan; Zhe Wang; Yan Wang; Jingjing Liu

Abstract

For semantic segmentation in urban scene understanding, RGB cameras alone often fail to capture a clear holistic topology in challenging lighting conditions. Thermal signal is an informative additional channel that can bring to light the contour and fine-grained texture of blurred regions in low-quality RGB image. Aiming at practical RGB-T (thermal) segmentation, we systematically propose a Spatial-aware Demand-guided Recursive Meshing (SpiderMesh) framework that: 1) proactively compensates inadequate contextual semantics in optically-impaired regions via a demand-guided target masking algorithm; 2) refines multimodal semantic features with recursive meshing to improve pixel-level semantic analysis performance. We further introduce an asymmetric data augmentation technique M-CutOut, and enable semi-supervised learning to fully utilize RGB-T labels only sparsely available in practical use. Extensive experiments on MFNet and PST900 datasets demonstrate that SpiderMesh achieves state-of-the-art performance on standard RGB-T segmentation benchmarks.