Learning Skip Map For Efficient Ultra-High Resolution Image Segmentation

The pattern distribution of ultra-high resolution images is usually unbalanced. While part of an image contains complex and fine-grained patterns such as boundaries, most areas are composed of simple and repeated patterns. In this work, we propose to learn a skip map, which can guide a segmentation network to skip simple patterns and hence reduce computational complexity. Specifically, the skip map highlights simple-pattern areas that can be down-sampled for processing at a lower resolution, while the remaining complex part is still segmented at the original resolution. Applied on the state-of-the-art ultra-high resolution image segmentation network GLNet, our proposed skip map saves more than 30% computation while maintaining comparable segmentation performance.