Distilling Inter-Class Distance for Semantic Segmentation

Distilling Inter-Class Distance for Semantic Segmentation

Zhengbo Zhang, Chunluan Zhou, Zhigang Tu

Proceedings of the Thirty-First International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence
Main Track. Pages 1686-1692. https://doi.org/10.24963/ijcai.2022/235

Knowledge distillation is widely adopted in semantic segmentation to reduce the computation cost. The previous knowledge distillation methods for semantic segmentation focus on pixel-wise feature alignment and intra-class feature variation distillation, neglecting to transfer the knowledge of the inter-class distance in the feature space, which is important for semantic segmentation such a pixel-wise classification task. To address this issue, we propose an Inter-class Distance Distillation (IDD) method to transfer the inter-class distance in the feature space from the teacher network to the student network. Furthermore, semantic segmentation is a position-dependent task, thus we exploit a position information distillation module to help the student network encode more position information. Extensive experiments on three popular datasets: Cityscapes, Pascal VOC and ADE20K show that our method is helpful to improve the accuracy of semantic segmentation models and achieves the state-of-the-art performance. E.g. it boosts the benchmark model (``PSPNet+ResNet18") by 7.50% in accuracy on the Cityscapes dataset.
Keywords:
Computer Vision: Transfer, low-shot, semi- and un- supervised learning   
Computer Vision: Recognition (object detection, categorization)
Computer Vision: Scene analysis and understanding   
Computer Vision: Segmentation