mlsanityData to 7 Oct 2026

Active Boundary Loss for Semantic Segmentation

arXiv 2102.02696 ↗First posted 4 Feb 2021cs.CVcited by 40

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Abstract (arXiv)

This paper proposes a novel active boundary loss for semantic segmentation. It can progressively encourage the alignment between predicted boundaries and ground-truth boundaries during end-to-end training, which is not explicitly enforced in commonly used cross-entropy loss. Based on the predicted boundaries detected from the segmentation results using current network parameters, we formulate the boundary alignment problem as a differentiable direction vector prediction problem to guide the movement of predicted boundaries in each iteration. Our loss is model-agnostic and can be plugged in to the training of segmentation networks to improve the boundary details. Experimental results show that training with the active boundary loss can effectively improve the boundary F-score and mean Intersection-over-Union on challenging image and video object segmentation datasets.

Key facts. Cited by 40 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Builds on 59 of its 78 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 4 Feb 2021.

Builds on

59 of 78 references.

References · 59

  1. 2015Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognitioncited by 51,809
  2. 2015U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentationcited by 19,604
  3. 2015Rethinking the Inception Architecture for Computer Visioncited by 5,451
  4. 2014Fully Convolutional Networks for Semantic Segmentationcited by 4,845
  5. 2017Squeeze-and-Excitation Networkscited by 4,763
  6. 2016The Cityscapes Dataset for Semantic Urban Scene Understandingcited by 4,427
  7. 2016DeepLab: Semantic Image Segmentation with Deep Convolutional Nets, Atrous Convolution, and Fully Connected CRFscited by 3,239
  8. 2018Encoder-Decoder with Atrous Separable Convolution for Semantic Image Segmentationcited by 3,210
  9. 2016Pyramid Scene Parsing Networkcited by 2,472
  10. 2017Non-local Neural Networkscited by 2,290
  11. 2017Rethinking Atrous Convolution for Semantic Image Segmentationcited by 2,154
  12. 2019Deep High-Resolution Representation Learning for Visual Recognitioncited by 1,417
38 more
  1. 2018Unified Perceptual Parsing for Scene Understandingcited by 1,265
  2. 2018Dual Attention Network for Scene Segmentationcited by 1,001
  3. 2018CCNet: Criss-Cross Attention for Semantic Segmentationcited by 717
  4. 2020Image Segmentation Using Deep Learning: A Surveycited by 659
  5. 2017Generalised Dice overlap as a deep learning loss function for highly unbalanced segmentationscited by 614
  6. 2019Segmentation Transformer: Object-Contextual Representations for Semantic Segmentationcited by 573
  7. 2016RefineNet: Multi-Path Refinement Networks for High-Resolution Semantic Segmentationcited by 463
  8. 2019PointRend: Image Segmentation as Renderingcited by 439
  9. 2019Video Object Segmentation using Space-Time Memory Networkscited by 436
  10. 2018Context Encoding for Semantic Segmentationcited by 289
  11. 2016One-Shot Video Object Segmentationcited by 233
  12. 2018YouTube-VOS: Sequence-to-Sequence Video Object Segmentationcited by 228
  13. 2018PAD-Net: Multi-Tasks Guided Prediction-and-Distillation Network for Simultaneous Depth Estimation and Scene Parsingcited by 224
  14. 2019High-Resolution Representations for Labeling Pixels and Regionscited by 211
  15. 2017Large Kernel Matters -- Improve Semantic Segmentation by Global Convolutional Networkcited by 208
  16. 2018Boundary loss for highly unbalanced segmentationcited by 187
  17. 2019FEELVOS: Fast End-to-End Embedding Learning for Video Object Segmentationcited by 178
  18. 2019Gated-SCNN: Gated Shape CNNs for Semantic Segmentationcited by 165
  19. 2019Expectation-Maximization Attention Networks for Semantic Segmentationcited by 147
  20. 2018OCNet: Object Context Network for Scene Parsingcited by 140
  21. 2018Instance-level Human Parsing via Part Grouping Networkcited by 134
  22. 2018Improving Semantic Segmentation via Video Propagation and Label Relaxationcited by 134
  23. 2020Disentangled Non-Local Neural Networkscited by 132
  24. 2016Fully Convolutional Instance-aware Semantic Segmentationcited by 122
  25. 2020Context Prior for Scene Segmentationcited by 121
  26. 2020CascadePSP: Toward Class-Agnostic and Very High-Resolution Segmentation via Global and Local Refinementcited by 113
  27. 2020Deep Snake for Real-Time Instance Segmentationcited by 111
  28. 2017Online Adaptation of Convolutional Neural Networks for Video Object Segmentationcited by 109
  29. 2019Boundary-Aware Feature Propagation for Scene Segmentationcited by 107
  30. 2020Improving Semantic Segmentation via Decoupled Body and Edge Supervisioncited by 98
  31. 2020SegFix: Model-Agnostic Boundary Refinement for Segmentationcited by 97
  32. 2017Video Object Segmentation Without Temporal Informationcited by 93
  33. 2018Devil in the Details: Towards Accurate Single and Multiple Human Parsingcited by 64
  34. 2019Dynamic Graph Message Passing Networkscited by 62
  35. 2019Adaptive Context Network for Scene Parsingcited by 51
  36. 2020Joint Semantic Segmentation and Boundary Detection using Iterative Pyramid Contextscited by 51
  37. 2018Adaptive Affinity Fields for Semantic Segmentationcited by 48
  38. 2018MaskRNN: Instance Level Video Object Segmentationcited by 48

50 most cited of 59 All 59 (JSON)

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Cited by year (2026 to 7 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2021: 3; 2022: 6; 2023: 8; 2024: 6; 2025: 7; 2026: 10.

40 papers.

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  1. 2021Standardized Max Logits: A Simple yet Effective Approach for Identifying Unexpected Road Obstacles in Urban-Scene Segmentationcited by 77
  2. 2023Loss Functions in the Era of Semantic Segmentation: A Survey and Outlookcited by 33
  3. 2023Semantic Diffusion Network for Semantic Segmentationcited by 30
  4. 2022Learning Local and Global Temporal Contexts for Video Semantic Segmentationcited by 24
  5. 2024Contextrast: Contextual Contrastive Learning for Semantic Segmentationcited by 12
  6. 2021Region-wise Loss for Biomedical Image Segmentationcited by 7
  7. 2021E-CRF: Embedded Conditional Random Field for Boundary-caused Class Weights Confusion in Semantic Segmentationcited by 7
  8. 2023IDRNet: Intervention-Driven Relation Network for Semantic Segmentationcited by 7
  9. 2025Training-Free Dataset Pruning for Instance Segmentationcited by 7
  10. 2022Contour-Aware Equipotential Learning for Semantic Segmentationcited by 6
  11. 2024Generative Edge Detection with Stable Diffusioncited by 5
  12. 2022Representation Separation for Semantic Segmentation with Vision Transformerscited by 4
28 more
  1. 2023B-BACN: Bayesian Boundary-Aware Convolutional Network for Crack Characterizationcited by 3
  2. 2022Zero Pixel Directional Boundary by Vector Transformcited by 2
  3. 2023Boosting Semantic Segmentation with Semantic Boundariescited by 2
  4. 2023Not All Pixels Are Equal: Learning Pixel Hardness for Semantic Segmentationcited by 2
  5. 2025MaSS13K: A Matting-level Semantic Segmentation Benchmarkcited by 2
  6. 2025Contour Flow Constraint: Preserving Global Shape Similarity for Deep Learning based Image Segmentationcited by 2
  7. 2022TriangleNet: Edge Prior Augmented Network for Semantic Segmentation through Cross-Task Consistencycited by 1
  8. 2026Make It Up: Fake Images, Real Gains in Generalized Few-shot Semantic Segmentationcited by 1
  9. 2026AdapToPASS: Ambiguity-aware Adaptive Spherical Transformer for Panoramic Semantic Segmentationcited by 1
  10. 20223D Convolutional Neural Networks for Dendrite Segmentation Using Fine-Tuning and Hyperparameter Optimizationcited by 0
  11. 2023Elastic Interaction Energy-Informed Real-Time Traffic Scene Perceptioncited by 0
  12. 2023PnPNet: Pull-and-Push Networks for Volumetric Segmentation with Boundary Confusioncited by 0
  13. 2024Towards Customized Knowledge Distillation for Chip-Level Dense Image Predictionscited by 0
  14. 2024CloudTracks: A Dataset for Localizing Ship Tracks in Satellite Images of Cloudscited by 0
  15. 2024Convolution-based Probability Gradient Loss for Semantic Segmentationcited by 0
  16. 2024DBF-Net: A Dual-Branch Network with Feature Fusion for Ultrasound Image Segmentationcited by 0
  17. 2025BARIS: Boundary-Aware Refinement with Environmental Degradation Priors for Robust Underwater Instance Segmentationcited by 0
  18. 2025DepthMatch: Semi-Supervised RGB-D Scene Parsing through Depth-Guided Regularizationcited by 0
  19. 2025TEFormer: Texture-Aware and Edge-Guided Transformer for Semantic Segmentation of Urban Remote Sensing Imagescited by 0
  20. 2025Microsurgical Instrument Segmentation for Robot-Assisted Surgerycited by 0
  21. 2026A Cross-Scale Decoder with Token Refinement for Off-Road Semantic Segmentationcited by 0
  22. 2026D-Convexity: A Unified Differentiable Convex Shape Prior via Quasi-Concavity for Data-driven Image Segmentationcited by 0
  23. 2026Implicit Fuzzification via Bounded Noise Injection for Robust Medical Image Segmentationcited by 0
  24. 2026TRNet: Learning with Topographic Priors for VHR Paddy Rice Mappingcited by 0
  25. 2026BASeg: Boundary-Aware Remote Sensing Segmentation with Structural Penaltiescited by 0
  26. 2026Contextrast++: Robust Multi-Scale Contextual Contrastive Learning for Semantic Segmentationcited by 0
  27. 2026CoordFormer: Give Me Any Coordinates and I Will Give You Labelscited by 0
  28. 2026UniBuild: Unified Building Mapping From Multi-Source Optical Remote Sensing Imagery With Detail Decoding and Geometry Regularizationcited by 0