Max-margin learning of deep structured models for semantic segmentation

Paper in proceeding, 2017

During the last few years most work done on the task of image segmentation has been focused on deep learning and Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) in particular. CNNs are powerful for modeling complex connections between input and output data but lack the ability to directly model dependent output structures, for instance, enforcing properties such as smoothness and coherence. This drawback motivates the use of Conditional Random Fields (CRFs), widely applied as a post-processing step in semantic segmentation. In this paper, we propose a learning framework that jointly trains the parameters of a CNN paired with a CRF. For this, we develop theoretical tools making it possible to optimize a max-margin objective with back-propagation. The max-margin loss function gives the model good generalization capabilities. Thus, the method is especially suitable for applications where labelled data is limited, for example, medical applications. This generalization capability is reflected in our results where we are able to show good performance on two relatively small medical datasets. The method is also evaluated on a public benchmark (frequently used for semantic segmentation) yielding results competitive to state-of-the-art. Overall, we demonstrate that end-to-end max-margin training is preferred over piecewise training when combining a CNN with a CRF.