Edge-assisted Object Segmentation Using Multimodal Feature Aggregation and Learning

Abstract

Object segmentation aims to perfectly identify objects embedded in the surrounding environment and has a wide range of applications. Most previous methods of object segmentation only use RGB images and ignore geometric information from disparity images. Making full use of heterogeneous data from different devices has proved to be a very effective strategy for improving segmentation performance. The key challenge of the multimodal fusion-based object segmentation task lies in the learning, transformation, and fusion of multimodal information. In this article, we focus on the transformation of disparity images and the fusion of multimodal features. We develop a multimodal fusion object segmentation framework, termed the Hybrid Fusion Segmentation Network (HFSNet). Specifically, HFSNet contains three key components, i.e., disparity convolutional sparse coding (DCSC), asymmetric dense projection feature aggregation (ADPFA), and multimodal feature fusion (MFF). The DCSC is designed based on convolutional sparse coding. It not only has better interpretability but also preserves the key geometric information of the object. ADPFA is designed to enhance texture and geometric information to fully exploit nonadjacent features. MFF is used to perform multimodal feature fusion. Extensive experiments show that our HFSNet outperforms existing state-of-the-art models on two challenging datasets.