SCTNet: Single-Branch CNN with Transformer Semantic Information for Real-Time Segmentation

TL;DR

SCTNet introduces a single-branch CNN that leverages transformer-based semantic information during training to achieve real-time semantic segmentation with high accuracy and efficiency.

Contribution

The paper proposes a novel single-branch CNN architecture that incorporates transformer semantic information during training, eliminating the need for additional branches during inference.

Findings

Achieves state-of-the-art performance on Cityscapes, ADE20K, and COCO-Stuff-10K datasets.

Maintains high inference speed with only a single CNN branch during deployment.

Demonstrates effective semantic information transfer from transformer during training.

Abstract

Recent real-time semantic segmentation methods usually adopt an additional semantic branch to pursue rich long-range context. However, the additional branch incurs undesirable computational overhead and slows inference speed. To eliminate this dilemma, we propose SCTNet, a single branch CNN with transformer semantic information for real-time segmentation. SCTNet enjoys the rich semantic representations of an inference-free semantic branch while retaining the high efficiency of lightweight single branch CNN. SCTNet utilizes a transformer as the training-only semantic branch considering its superb ability to extract long-range context. With the help of the proposed transformer-like CNN block CFBlock and the semantic information alignment module, SCTNet could capture the rich semantic information from the transformer branch in training. During the inference, only the single branch CNN needs to be deployed. We conduct extensive experiments on Cityscapes, ADE20K, and COCO-Stuff-10K, and the results show that our method achieves the new state-of-the-art performance. The code and model is available at https://github.com/xzz777/SCTNet