# Trans4Trans: Efficient Transformer for Transparent Object and Semantic Scene Segmentation in Real-World Navigation Assistance

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2108.09174 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.09174/

## Key facts

- Cited by 22 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 58 of its 100 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 20 Aug 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 58)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [Swin Transformer: Hierarchical Vision Transformer using Shifted Windows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14030/) (2021)
- [End-to-End Object Detection with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.12872/) (2020)
- [Mask R-CNN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06870/) (2017)
- [Fully Convolutional Networks for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.4038/) (2014)
- [MobileNetV2: Inverted Residuals and Linear Bottlenecks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.04381/) (2018)
- [The Cityscapes Dataset for Semantic Urban Scene Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.01685/) (2016)
- [Encoder-Decoder with Atrous Separable Convolution for Semantic Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.02611/) (2018)
- [SegFormer: Simple and Efficient Design for Semantic Segmentation with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.15203/) (2021)
- [Pyramid Scene Parsing Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.01105/) (2016)
- [Pyramid Vision Transformer: A Versatile Backbone for Dense Prediction without Convolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.12122/) (2021)
- [Is Space-Time Attention All You Need for Video Understanding?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.05095/) (2021)
- [Deep High-Resolution Representation Learning for Visual Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.07919/) (2019)
- [Rethinking Semantic Segmentation from a Sequence-to-Sequence Perspective with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.15840/) (2020)
- [Per-Pixel Classification is Not All You Need for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.06278/) (2021)
- [Dual Attention Network for Scene Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.02983/) (2018)
- [Segmenter: Transformer for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.05633/) (2021)
- [PVT v2: Improved Baselines with Pyramid Vision Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.13797/) (2021)
- [CCNet: Criss-Cross Attention for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.11721/) (2018)
- [BiSeNet: Bilateral Segmentation Network for Real-time Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.00897/) (2018)
- [CSWin Transformer: A General Vision Transformer Backbone with Cross-Shaped Windows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.00652/) (2021)
- [RefineNet: Multi-Path Refinement Networks for High-Resolution Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.06612/) (2016)
- [Joint 2D-3D-Semantic Data for Indoor Scene Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.01105/) (2017)
- [MaX-DeepLab: End-to-End Panoptic Segmentation with Mask Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.00759/) (2020)
- [ENet: A Deep Neural Network Architecture for Real-Time Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.02147/) (2016)
- [ICNet for Real-Time Semantic Segmentation on High-Resolution Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.08545/) (2017)

## Built on by (most cited first, 22 of 22)

- [CMX: Cross-Modal Fusion for RGB-X Semantic Segmentation with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.04838/) (2022)
- [TransDARC: Transformer-based Driver Activity Recognition with Latent Space Feature Calibration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.00927/) (2022)
- [TransKD: Transformer Knowledge Distillation for Efficient Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.13393/) (2022)
- [Hyperbolic Uncertainty Aware Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.08881/) (2022)
- [Panoramic Panoptic Segmentation: Insights Into Surrounding Parsing for Mobile Agents via Unsupervised Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.10711/) (2022)
- [Double Domain Guided Real-Time Low-Light Image Enhancement for Ultra-High-Definition Transportation Surveillance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.08382/) (2023)
- [VL-TGS: Trajectory Generation and Selection using Vision Language Models in Mapless Outdoor Environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.02454/) (2024)
- [D3Former: Debiased Dual Distilled Transformer for Incremental Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.00777/) (2022)
- [MateRobot: Material Recognition in Wearable Robotics for People with Visual Impairments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.14595/) (2023)
- [Computational Imaging for Machine Perception: Transferring Semantic Segmentation beyond Aberrations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.11257/) (2022)
- [Towards Robust Semantic Segmentation of Accident Scenes via Multi-Source Mixed Sampling and Meta-Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.10395/) (2022)
- [Real-Time Multi-Scene Visibility Enhancement for Promoting Navigational Safety of Vessels Under Complex Weather Conditions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.01500/) (2024)
- [Continual Learning through Human-Robot Interaction: Human Perceptions of a Continual Learning Robot in Repeated Interactions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.16332/) (2023)
- [Rethinking Lightweight Convolutional Neural Networks for Efficient and High-quality Pavement Crack Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.05707/) (2021)
- [Trans4Map: Revisiting Holistic Bird's-Eye-View Mapping from Egocentric Images to Allocentric Semantics with Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.06205/) (2022)
- [OAFuser: Towards Omni-Aperture Fusion for Light Field Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.15588/) (2023)
- [Towards Precise 3D Human Pose Estimation with Multi-Perspective Spatial-Temporal Relational Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.16700/) (2024)
- [Influence of Water Droplet Contamination for Transparency Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.12861/) (2024)
- [Glass Surface Detection: Leveraging Reflection Dynamics in Flash/No-flash Imagery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.16887/) (2025)
- [Power of Boundary and Reflection: Semantic Transparent Object Segmentation using Pyramid Vision Transformer with Transparent Cues](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.07034/) (2025)
- [A Large-Scale Dataset and a New Method for RemoteSensing Traffic Object Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.03945/) (2026)
- [GHOST: Geometry-Guided Hallucination of Opaque Surface Textures](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.11118/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Transparent objects, such as glass walls and doors, constitute architectural obstacles hindering the mobility of people with low vision or blindness. For instance, the open space behind glass doors is inaccessible, unless it is correctly perceived and interacted with. However, traditional assistive technologies rarely cover the segmentation of these safety-critical transparent objects. In this paper, we build a wearable system with a novel dual-head Transformer for Transparency (Trans4Trans) perception model, which can segment general- and transparent objects. The two dense segmentation results are further combined with depth information in the system to help users navigate safely and assist them to negotiate transparent obstacles. We propose a lightweight Transformer Parsing Module (TPM) to perform multi-scale feature interpretation in the transformer-based decoder. Benefiting from TPM, the double decoders can perform joint learning from corresponding datasets to pursue robustness, meanwhile maintain efficiency on a portable GPU, with negligible calculation increase. The entire Trans4Trans model is constructed in a symmetrical encoder-decoder architecture, which outperforms state-of-the-art methods on the test sets of Stanford2D3D and Trans10K-v2 datasets, obtaining mIoU of 45.13% and 75.14%, respectively. Through a user study and various pre-tests conducted in indoor and outdoor scenes, the usability and reliability of our assistive system have been extensively verified. Meanwhile, the Tran4Trans model has outstanding performances on driving scene datasets. On Cityscapes, ACDC, and DADA-seg datasets corresponding to common environments, adverse weather, and traffic accident scenarios, mIoU scores of 81.5%, 76.3%, and 39.2% are obtained, demonstrating its high efficiency and robustness for real-world transportation applications.