ChaInNet: Deep Chain Instance Segmentation Network for Panoptic Segmentation

We consider the competition between instance and semantic segmentation in panoptic segmentation to develop the deep chain instance segmentation network (ChaInNet) to mitigate this problem. Segmentation competition is caused by the usual contradiction between instance and semantic segmentation when predicting instance objects. ChaInNet alternately performs inter-reference learning by stacking two-branch chain blocks to improve feature extraction from network layers. Panoptic segmentation using ChaInNet accurately extracts the contour of instance objects and improves the accuracy of instance segmentation, thus reducing the adverse effects of segmentation competition on the quality of the outcome. ChaInNet is a general instance segmentation architecture that can be widely used in various object recognition tasks. Experimental results on the MS COCO and Cityscapes benchmark datasets show that ChaInNet provides state-of-the-art segmentation and outperforms Mask R-CNN, which is commonly used for identifying instance objects in panoptic segmentation.