Cascade contour-enhanced panoptic segmentation for robotic vision perception

Panoptic segmentation plays a crucial role in enabling robots to comprehend their surroundings, providing fine-grained scene understanding information for robots' intelligent tasks. Although existing methods have made some progress, they are prone to fail in areas with weak textures, small objects, etc. Inspired by biological vision research, we propose a cascaded contour-enhanced panoptic segmentation network called CCPSNet, attempting to enhance the discriminability of instances through structural knowledge. To acquire the scene structure, a cascade contour detection stream is designed, which extracts comprehensive scene contours using channel regulation structural perception module and coarse-to-fine cascade strategy. Furthermore, the contour-guided multi-scale feature enhancement stream is developed to boost the discrimination ability for small objects and weak textures. The stream integrates contour information and multi-scale context features through structural-aware feature modulation module and inverse aggregation technique. Experimental results show that our method improves accuracy on the Cityscapes (61.2 PQ) and COCO (43.5 PQ) datasets while also demonstrating robustness in challenging simulated real-world complex scenarios faced by robots, such as dirty cameras and rainy conditions. The proposed network promises to help the robot perceive the real scene. In future work, an unsupervised training strategy for the network could be explored to reduce the training cost.