# Attention guided global enhancement and local refinement network for semantic segmentation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2204.04363 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.04363/

## Key facts

- Cited by 10 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 34 of its 45 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 9 Apr 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 34)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [Densely Connected Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.06993/) (2016)
- [Feature Pyramid Networks for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.03144/) (2016)
- [Fully Convolutional Networks for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.4038/) (2014)
- [Squeeze-and-Excitation Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.01507/) (2017)
- [The Cityscapes Dataset for Semantic Urban Scene Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.01685/) (2016)
- [DeepLab: Semantic Image Segmentation with Deep Convolutional Nets, Atrous Convolution, and Fully Connected CRFs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.00915/) (2016)
- [Pyramid Scene Parsing Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.01105/) (2016)
- [CBAM: Convolutional Block Attention Module](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.06521/) (2018)
- [Non-local Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.07971/) (2017)
- [V-Net: Fully Convolutional Neural Networks for Volumetric Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.04797/) (2016)
- [Rethinking Atrous Convolution for Semantic Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.05587/) (2017)
- [SegNet: A Deep Convolutional Encoder-Decoder Architecture for Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.00561/) (2015)
- [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)
- [Dual Attention Network for Scene Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.02983/) (2018)
- [CCNet: Criss-Cross Attention for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.11721/) (2018)
- [Segmentation Transformer: Object-Contextual Representations for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.11065/) (2019)
- [Semantic Image Segmentation with Deep Convolutional Nets and Fully Connected CRFs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.7062/) (2014)
- [RefineNet: Multi-Path Refinement Networks for High-Resolution Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.06612/) (2016)
- [Learning Deconvolution Network for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04366/) (2015)
- [GCNet: Non-local Networks Meet Squeeze-Excitation Networks and Beyond](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.11492/) (2019)
- [Context Encoding for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.08904/) (2018)
- [High-Resolution Representations for Labeling Pixels and Regions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.04514/) (2019)
- [Expectation-Maximization Attention Networks for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.13426/) (2019)
- [Context Prior for Scene Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.01547/) (2020)
- [CARAFE: Content-Aware ReAssembly of FEatures](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.02188/) (2019)
- [CGNet: A Light-weight Context Guided Network for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.08201/) (2018)
- [GFF: Gated Fully Fusion for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.01803/) (2019)

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

- [Refined Semantic Enhancement towards Frequency Diffusion for Video Captioning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.15076/) (2022)
- [Boosting Night-time Scene Parsing with Learnable Frequency](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.14241/) (2022)
- [VSR-Net: Vessel-like Structure Rehabilitation Network with Graph Clustering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.13116/) (2023)
- [SERNet-Former: Semantic Segmentation by Efficient Residual Network with Attention-Boosting Gates and Attention-Fusion Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.15741/) (2024)
- [Pixel-Level Domain Adaptation: A New Perspective for Enhancing Weakly Supervised Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.02039/) (2024)
- [MVTN: A Multiscale Video Transformer Network for Hand Gesture Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.03890/) (2024)
- [UCS: A Universal Model for Curvilinear Structure Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.04034/) (2025)
- [Efficient Semantic Segmentation via Lightweight Multiple-Information Interaction Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.02224/) (2024)
- [A Robust Morphological Approach for Semantic Segmentation of Very High Resolution Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.01254/) (2022)
- [A Warm-basis Method for Bridging Learning and Iteration: a Case Study in Fluorescence Molecular Tomography](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.05926/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The encoder-decoder architecture is widely used as a lightweight semantic segmentation network. However, it struggles with a limited performance compared to a well-designed Dilated-FCN model for two major problems. First, commonly used upsampling methods in the decoder such as interpolation and deconvolution suffer from a local receptive field, unable to encode global contexts. Second, low-level features may bring noises to the network decoder through skip connections for the inadequacy of semantic concepts in early encoder layers. To tackle these challenges, a Global Enhancement Method is proposed to aggregate global information from high-level feature maps and adaptively distribute them to different decoder layers, alleviating the shortage of global contexts in the upsampling process. Besides, a Local Refinement Module is developed by utilizing the decoder features as the semantic guidance to refine the noisy encoder features before the fusion of these two (the decoder features and the encoder features). Then, the two methods are integrated into a Context Fusion Block, and based on that, a novel Attention guided Global enhancement and Local refinement Network (AGLN) is elaborately designed. Extensive experiments on PASCAL Context, ADE20K, and PASCAL VOC 2012 datasets have demonstrated the effectiveness of the proposed approach. In particular, with a vanilla ResNet-101 backbone, AGLN achieves the state-of-the-art result (56.23% mean IoU) on the PASCAL Context dataset. The code is available at https://github.com/zhasen1996/AGLN.