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Explained: Reverse Attention Network (RAN) in Image Segmentation
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Explained: Reverse Attention Network (RAN) in Image Segmentation

Last Updated on October 1, 2022 by Editorial Team

Author(s): Leo Wang

Originally published on Towards AI the World’s Leading AI and Technology News and Media Company. If you are building an AI-related product or service, we invite you to consider becoming an AI sponsor. At Towards AI, we help scale AI and technology startups. Let us help you unleash your technology to the masses.

Photo by Devin Avery onΒ Unsplash

Table OfΒ Contents

· ⭐️ Problems
· ⭐️ A Solution
· ⭐ ️Reverse Attention Network (RAN)
∘ Reverse Branch (RB)
∘ Reverse Attention Branch (RAB)
∘ Combine the result
· ⭐️ Training
· ⭐️ Performance
Β·Β Citation

⭐️ Problems

  • Most CNN-based semantic segmentation methods focus on simply getting the predictions right without mechanisms teaching the model to discern the difference between classes. (so characteristics of less common classes might beΒ ignored)
  • High-level features are shared in different classes due to the visual similarity among classes, which may yield confusing results in regions containing the boundaries of different classes (e.g., background with an object because they have similar activation strength) or when they are mixed together.
Fig. 1

To have a better understanding of the problem, please see Fig. 1. As seen from the attention heatmap, it is obvious that most nowadays encoder-decoder models would have strong neural activations on parts that two objects are β€œmixed” together (aka. have obscure boundaries or regions where 2+ objects share similar spatial patterns), where the model should not pay too much attention on those β€œmixed” parts during predictions atΒ all.

⭐️ A Solution

  • The authors devised a mechanism to identify those mixed special regions and amplify the weaker activations to capture the target object, so the network learns not only to discern the background class but also learns to discern different objects all present in theΒ image.

Therefore, they proposed a novel architecture and dubbed itβ€œReverse Attention Network” (RAN) to address the aforementioned problems.

Fig. 2: Their proposed network:Β RAN

In RAN, there are two different branches (one circled in red and one circled in blue) designed to learn background features and the object’s features, respectively.

To further highlight the knowledge learned from the object class, a reverse attention structure is designated to generate per-class masks to amplify the object class’s activations in the confusedΒ region.

Lastly, the predictions are fused together to yield the final prediction.

⭐ ️Reverse Attention Network (RAN)

To have a more detailed understanding of the proposed model, please see Fig.Β 3.

Fig. 3: Overall view of RAN. There are three branches colored in yellow, blue, andΒ green.

To break down the process into a few steps after the input image isΒ given:

  • A feature map is generated using a selected model architecture (Usually ResNet-101 or VGG16, but it can vary) to learn object features.
  • Then, the map is split into two branches.
Fig. 4: Reverse Branch (cropped from Fig.Β 3).

Reverse BranchΒ (RB)

  • Colored in yellow, the model first trains a CONV_rev layer to learn the β€œreverse object class” explicitly (the reverse object class is the reversed ground truth for the objectΒ class).
  • In order to get the reverse object class, the background and other classes are set to 1, while the object class is set toΒ 0.
  • When it is a multi-class segmentation problem, however, an alternative is commonly used by reversing the sign of all class-wise activations (the NEG block) before feeding to the softmax-based classifier. This approach allows the CONV_rev layer to be trained using the same class-wise ground-truth label.
Fig. 5: Reverse Attention Branch (cropped from Fig.Β 3).

Reverse Attention BranchΒ (RAB)

  • Instead of directly applying element-wise subtractions to the original prediction by the activations of the reverse branch due to worse performance, the Reverse Attention Branch is proposed to highlight the regions overlooked by the original prediction (including mixed and background areas). The output of reverse attention would generate a class-oriented mask to amplify the reverse activation map.
  • As shown in Fig. 3 and Fig. 5, the initial feature map from the input image is fed into the CONV_orgΒ layer.
  • Then, the resulting feature map’s pixel values are flipped by the NEGΒ block.
  • Then, the sigmoid function is applied to convert pixel values between [0, 1], before feeding the feature map to the attention map, where an attention mask isΒ applied.
  • The aforementioned steps could be summarized into Formula 1, where i, j indicate the pixel location.
  • Therefore, the region with small or negative responses will be highlighted by NEG and the sigmoid operations, but the areas of positive activations (or confident scores) will be suppressed in the reverse attention branch.
Formula 1

Combine theΒ result

  • Then, the map from the Reverse Attention Branch is element-wise-ly multiplied by the Reverse Branch. The resulting map is subtracted from the original prediction to generate the final prediction.
Fig. 3: Overall view of RAN (duplicated for an easier reference!).

⭐️ Training

This is beyond the scope of this article, so we would just show you the original text from theΒ paper:

⭐️ Performance

Table 1: Performance comparison with popular semantic segmentation architectures on popular datasets.

Thank you! ❀️

Citation

[1] Semantic Segmentation with Reverse Attention


Explained: Reverse Attention Network (RAN) in Image Segmentation was originally published in Towards AI on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

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