# In Defense of Pre-trained ImageNet Architectures for Real-time Semantic Segmentation of Road-driving Images

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1903.08469 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.08469/

## Key facts

- Cited by 100 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 20 Mar 2019.

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 100)

- [SegNeXt: Rethinking Convolutional Attention Design for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.08575/) (2022)
- [CMX: Cross-Modal Fusion for RGB-X Semantic Segmentation with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.04838/) (2022)
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- [Lite-HRNet: A Lightweight High-Resolution Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.06403/) (2021)
- [Deep Dual-resolution Networks for Real-time and Accurate Semantic Segmentation of Road Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.06085/) (2021)
- [PIDNet: A Real-time Semantic Segmentation Network Inspired by PID Controllers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.02066/) (2022)
- [TopFormer: Token Pyramid Transformer for Mobile Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.05525/) (2022)
- [FaPN: Feature-aligned Pyramid Network for Dense Image Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.07058/) (2021)
- [Bending Reality: Distortion-aware Transformers for Adapting to Panoramic Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.01452/) (2022)
- [Capturing Omni-Range Context for Omnidirectional Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.05687/) (2021)
- [Behind Every Domain There is a Shift: Adapting Distortion-aware Vision Transformers for Panoramic Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.11860/) (2022)
- [Improving Multi-Modal Learning with Uni-Modal Teachers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.11059/) (2021)
- [HR-NAS: Searching Efficient High-Resolution Neural Architectures with Lightweight Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.06560/) (2021)
- [Transfer beyond the Field of View: Dense Panoramic Semantic Segmentation via Unsupervised Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.11062/) (2021)
- [Frequency-Adaptive Dilated Convolution for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.05369/) (2024)
- [Semantics, Distortion, and Style Matter: Towards Source-free UDA for Panoramic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.12505/) (2024)
- [PP-LiteSeg: A Superior Real-Time Semantic Segmentation Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.02681/) (2022)
- [Efficient Multi-Task RGB-D Scene Analysis for Indoor Environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.04526/) (2022)
- [CMDA: Cross-Modality Domain Adaptation for Nighttime Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.15942/) (2023)
- [Open-World Semantic Segmentation Including Class Similarity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.07532/) (2024)
- [Panoramic Panoptic Segmentation: Towards Complete Surrounding Understanding via Unsupervised Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00868/) (2021)
- [Exploring Event-driven Dynamic Context for Accident Scene Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.05006/) (2021)
- [Double Similarity Distillation for Semantic Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.08591/) (2021)
- [TransKD: Transformer Knowledge Distillation for Efficient Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.13393/) (2022)
- [A Survey on Semi-Supervised Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.09899/) (2023)
- [Open Panoramic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.02685/) (2024)
- [Stage-Aware Feature Alignment Network for Real-Time Semantic Segmentation of Street Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.04031/) (2022)
- [Image Understands Point Cloud: Weakly Supervised 3D Semantic Segmentation via Association Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.07774/) (2022)
- [AttaNet: Attention-Augmented Network for Fast and Accurate Scene Parsing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.05930/) (2021)
- [Panoramic Panoptic Segmentation: Insights Into Surrounding Parsing for Mobile Agents via Unsupervised Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.10711/) (2022)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Recent success of semantic segmentation approaches on demanding road driving datasets has spurred interest in many related application fields. Many of these applications involve real-time prediction on mobile platforms such as cars, drones and various kinds of robots. Real-time setup is challenging due to extraordinary computational complexity involved. Many previous works address the challenge with custom lightweight architectures which decrease computational complexity by reducing depth, width and layer capacity with respect to general purpose architectures. We propose an alternative approach which achieves a significantly better performance across a wide range of computing budgets. First, we rely on a light-weight general purpose architecture as the main recognition engine. Then, we leverage light-weight upsampling with lateral connections as the most cost-effective solution to restore the prediction resolution. Finally, we propose to enlarge the receptive field by fusing shared features at multiple resolutions in a novel fashion. Experiments on several road driving datasets show a substantial advantage of the proposed approach, either with ImageNet pre-trained parameters or when we learn from scratch. Our Cityscapes test submission entitled SwiftNetRN-18 delivers 75.5% MIoU and achieves 39.9 Hz on 1024x2048 images on GTX1080Ti.