As a fine-grained segmentation task, human parsing is still faced with two challenges: inter-part indistinction and intra-part inconsistency, due to the ambiguous definitions and confusing relationships between similar human parts. To tackle these two problems, this paper proposes a novel \textit{Affinity-aware Compression and Expansion} Network (ACENet), which mainly consists of two modules: Local Compression Module (LCM) and Global Expansion Module (GEM). Specifically, LCM compresses parts-correlation information through structural skeleton points, obtained from an extra skeleton branch. It can decrease the inter-part interference, and strengthen structural relationships between ambiguous parts. Furthermore, GEM expands semantic information of each part into a complete piece by incorporating the spatial affinity with boundary guidance, which can effectively enhance the semantic consistency of intra-part as well. ACENet achieves new state-of-the-art performance on the challenging LIP and Pascal-Person-Part datasets. In particular, 58.1% mean IoU is achieved on the LIP benchmark.
@article{arxiv.2008.10191,
title = {Affinity-aware Compression and Expansion Network for Human Parsing},
author = {Xinyan Zhang and Yunfeng Wang and Pengfei Xiong},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2008.10191},
year = {2020}
}