# Encoder-Decoder with Atrous Separable Convolution for Semantic Image Segmentation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1802.02611 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.02611/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3,223 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 7 Feb 2018.

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 3223)

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- [DINOv2: Learning Robust Visual Features without Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.07193/) (2023)
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- [Masked-attention Mask Transformer for Universal Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.01527/) (2021)
- [Pyramid Vision Transformer: A Versatile Backbone for Dense Prediction without Convolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.12122/) (2021)
- [Visual Prompt Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.12119/) (2022)
- [Per-Pixel Classification is Not All You Need for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.06278/) (2021)
- [Vision Mamba: Efficient Visual Representation Learning with Bidirectional State Space Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.09417/) (2024)
- [UNETR: Transformers for 3D Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.10504/) (2021)
- [Segmenter: Transformer for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.05633/) (2021)
- [UNISURF: Unifying Neural Implicit Surfaces and Radiance Fields for Multi-View Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.10078/) (2021)
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- [Open-Vocabulary Semantic Segmentation with Mask-adapted CLIP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.04150/) (2022)
- [DenseCLIP: Language-Guided Dense Prediction with Context-Aware Prompting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.01518/) (2021)
- [InternImage: Exploring Large-Scale Vision Foundation Models with Deformable Convolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.05778/) (2022)
- [Semi-Supervised Semantic Segmentation with Cross Pseudo Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.01226/) (2021)
- [Self-Supervised Pre-Training of Swin Transformers for 3D Medical Image Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.14791/) (2021)
- [U-Mamba: Enhancing Long-range Dependency for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.04722/) (2024)
- [In-Place Scene Labelling and Understanding with Implicit Scene Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.15875/) (2021)
- [DAFormer: Improving Network Architectures and Training Strategies for Domain-Adaptive Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.14887/) (2021)
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- [Generative Novel View Synthesis with 3D-Aware Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.02602/) (2023)
- [Urban Radiance Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.14643/) (2021)
- [LoveDA: A Remote Sensing Land-Cover Dataset for Domain Adaptive Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.08733/) (2021)
- [SegNeXt: Rethinking Convolutional Attention Design for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.08575/) (2022)
- [TransWeather: Transformer-based Restoration of Images Degraded by Adverse Weather Conditions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.14813/) (2021)
- [Exploring Cross-Image Pixel Contrast for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.11939/) (2021)
- [Seg-Zero: Reasoning-Chain Guided Segmentation via Cognitive Reinforcement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.06520/) (2025)
- [CMX: Cross-Modal Fusion for RGB-X Semantic Segmentation with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.04838/) (2022)
- [Sapiens: Foundation for Human Vision Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.12569/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Spatial pyramid pooling module or encode-decoder structure are used in deep neural networks for semantic segmentation task. The former networks are able to encode multi-scale contextual information by probing the incoming features with filters or pooling operations at multiple rates and multiple effective fields-of-view, while the latter networks can capture sharper object boundaries by gradually recovering the spatial information. In this work, we propose to combine the advantages from both methods. Specifically, our proposed model, DeepLabv3+, extends DeepLabv3 by adding a simple yet effective decoder module to refine the segmentation results especially along object boundaries. We further explore the Xception model and apply the depthwise separable convolution to both Atrous Spatial Pyramid Pooling and decoder modules, resulting in a faster and stronger encoder-decoder network. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed model on PASCAL VOC 2012 and Cityscapes datasets, achieving the test set performance of 89.0% and 82.1% without any post-processing. Our paper is accompanied with a publicly available reference implementation of the proposed models in Tensorflow at urlhttps://github.com/tensorflow/models/tree/master/research/deeplab.