Region Mutual Information Loss for Semantic Segmentation

Semantic segmentation is a fundamental problem in computer vision. It is considered as a pixel-wise classification problem in practice, and most segmentation models use a pixel-wise loss as their optimization criterion. However, the pixel-wise loss ignores the dependencies between pixels in an image. Several ways to exploit the relationship between pixels have been investigated, \eg, conditional random fields (CRF) and pixel affinity based methods. Nevertheless, these methods usually require additional model branches, large extra memories, or more inference time.