# SCG-Net: Self-Constructing Graph Neural Networks for Semantic Segmentation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2009.01599 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.01599/

## Key facts

- Cited by 10 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 3 Sep 2020.

## Built on by (most cited first, 10 of 10)

- [Deep Learning strategies for ProtoDUNE raw data denoising](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.01596/) (2021)
- [SINGA-Easy: An Easy-to-Use Framework for MultiModal Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.02572/) (2021)
- [VisualTextRank: Unsupervised Graph-based Content Extraction for Automating Ad Text to Image Search](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.02725/) (2021)
- [Text is NOT Enough: Integrating Visual Impressions into Open-domain Dialogue Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.05778/) (2021)
- [Discovering Personalized Semantics for Soft Attributes in Recommender Systems using Concept Activation Vectors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.02830/) (2022)
- [Reinforced MOOCs Concept Recommendation in Heterogeneous Information Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.11011/) (2022)
- [Explanation-Guided Fairness Testing through Genetic Algorithm](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.08335/) (2022)
- [Using Graph Neural Networks for Program Termination](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.14648/) (2022)
- [Tribe or Not? Critical Inspection of Group Differences Using TribalGram](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.09664/) (2023)
- [Medical Image Analysis using Deep Relational Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.16099/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Capturing global contextual representations by exploiting long-range pixel-pixel dependencies has shown to improve semantic segmentation performance. However, how to do this efficiently is an open question as current approaches of utilising attention schemes or very deep models to increase the models field of view, result in complex models with large memory consumption. Inspired by recent work on graph neural networks, we propose the Self-Constructing Graph (SCG) module that learns a long-range dependency graph directly from the image and uses it to propagate contextual information efficiently to improve semantic segmentation. The module is optimised via a novel adaptive diagonal enhancement method and a variational lower bound that consists of a customized graph reconstruction term and a Kullback-Leibler divergence regularization term. When incorporated into a neural network (SCG-Net), semantic segmentation is performed in an end-to-end manner and competitive performance (mean F1-scores of 92.0% and 89.8% respectively) on the publicly available ISPRS Potsdam and Vaihingen datasets is achieved, with much fewer parameters, and at a lower computational cost compared to related pure convolutional neural network (CNN) based models.
