Papers › FasterSeg: Searching for Faster Real-time Semantic Segmentation

FasterSeg: Searching for Faster Real-time Semantic Segmentation

23 Dec 2019ICLR 2020 1arXiv:1912.10917archive 2025-07-28

Wuyang Chen, Xinyu Gong, Xian-Ming Liu, Qian Zhang, Yuan Li, Zhangyang Wang

We present FasterSeg, an automatically designed semantic segmentation network with not only state-of-the-art performance but also faster speed than current methods. Utilizing neural architecture search (NAS), FasterSeg is discovered from a novel and broader search space integrating multi-resolution branches, that has been recently found to be vital in manually designed segmentation models. To better calibrate the balance between the goals of high accuracy and low latency, we propose a decoupled and fine-grained latency regularization, that effectively overcomes our observed phenomenons that the searched networks are prone to "collapsing" to low-latency yet poor-accuracy models. Moreover, we seamlessly extend FasterSeg to a new collaborative search (co-searching) framework, simultaneously searching for a teacher and a student network in the same single run. The teacher-student distillation further boosts the student model's accuracy. Experiments on popular segmentation benchmarks demonstrate the competency of FasterSeg. For example, FasterSeg can run over 30% faster than the closest manually designed competitor on Cityscapes, while maintaining comparable accuracy.

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Code

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TAMU-VITA/FasterSeg officialmentioned in papermentioned on GitHubpytorchMIT report
gaussianer/fasterseg mentioned on GitHubpytorchMIT report

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1ran · our draft was wrong
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gumbel_softmax_sample TAMU-VITA/FasterSeg/search/model_search.py official repository ran · fixture could not drive it MIT (permissive) · 0d41bbe52278fde1 · report
sample_gumbel TAMU-VITA/FasterSeg/search/model_search.py official repository ran · our draft was wrong MIT (permissive) · 7c913c414af7196f · report
downs2path TAMU-VITA/FasterSeg/latency/model_seg.py official repository unverified MIT (permissive) · dfe5e7d3e26a5cf3 · report
find_latency TAMU-VITA/FasterSeg/latency/latency_lookup_table.py official repository unverified MIT (permissive) · 9042a9ffc3ec7b3c · report
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path2downs TAMU-VITA/FasterSeg/latency/model_seg.py official repository unverified MIT (permissive) · cb0ded7195db7c27 · report
profile_estimated TAMU-VITA/FasterSeg/latency/latency_lookup_table.py official repository unverified MIT (permissive) · db2e7923db7297de · report
softmax TAMU-VITA/FasterSeg/latency/model_seg.py official repository unverified MIT (permissive) · 961eced33874cb53 · report
countFiles gaussianer/fasterseg/dataset/pull_data_exchange.py community (archive-listed) unverified MIT (permissive) · a8dbcf8fd1f7a07e · report
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Tasks

Neural Architecture SearchReal-Time Semantic SegmentationSegmentationSemantic Segmentation

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

TaskDatasetModelMetricValueRank at snapshotLeaderboardReport
Real-Time Semantic Segmentation Cityscapes val FasterSeg Frame (fps) 163.9 #21 of 24 Archive leaderboard report
Real-Time Semantic Segmentation Cityscapes val FasterSeg mIoU 73.1 #21 of 24 Archive leaderboard report
Semantic Segmentation BDD FasterSeg mIoU 55.1 #1 of 1 Archive leaderboard report
Semantic Segmentation Cityscapes test FasterSeg Mean IoU (class) 71.5% #74 of 105 Archive leaderboard report
Semantic Segmentation Cityscapes val FasterSeg mIoU 73.1% #80 of 99 Archive leaderboard report

Ranks are positions in the archive's leaderboards as they stood at the 2025-07-28 snapshot. Results published since then are not among these rows, so a rank here is not a current standing.

Methods

LSTMSPEEDSigmoid ActivationSoftmaxTanh Activation

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