Efficient Instance and Semantic Segmentation for Automated Driving

Environment perception for automated vehicles is achieved by fusing the outputs of different sensors such as cameras, LIDARs and RADARs. Images provide a semantic understanding of the environment at object level using instance segmentation, but also at background level using semantic segmentation. We propose a fully convolutional residual network based on Mask R-CNN to achieve both semantic and instance level recognition. We aim at developing an efficient network that could run in real-time for automated driving applications without compromising accuracy. Moreover, we compare and experiment with two different backbone architectures, a classification type of network and a faster segmentation type of network based on dilated convolutions. Experiments demonstrate top results on the publicly available Cityscapes dataset.