ShareCMP: Polarization-Aware RGB-P Semantic Segmentation
This work addresses underwater semantic segmentation for robotics or environmental monitoring by improving efficiency and performance with polarization data, though it is incremental in adapting existing multimodal methods to a new modality.
The paper tackles multimodal semantic segmentation using RGB-Polarization (RGB-P) data by introducing ShareCMP, a framework with a shared dual-branch encoder that reduces parameters by 33.8% and achieves state-of-the-art mIoU scores, such as 92.45% on the UPLight dataset.
Multimodal semantic segmentation is developing rapidly, but the modality of RGB-\textbf{P}olarization remains underexplored. To delve into this problem, we construct a UPLight RGB-P segmentation benchmark with 12 typical underwater semantic classes. In this work, we design the ShareCMP, an RGB-P semantic segmentation framework with a shared dual-branch architecture (ShareCMP Encoder), which reduces the parameters and memory space by about 33.8\% compared to previous dual-branch models. It encompasses a Polarization Generate Attention (PGA) module designed to generate polarization modal images with richer polarization properties for the encoder. In addition, we introduce the Class Polarization-Aware Loss (CPALoss) with Class Polarization-Aware Auxiliary Head (CPAAHead) to improve the learning and understanding of the encoder for polarization modal information and to optimize the PGA module. With extensive experiments on a total of three RGB-P benchmarks, our ShareCMP achieves the best performance in mIoU with fewer parameters on the UPLight (92.45{\small (+0.32)}\%), ZJU (92.7{\small (+0.1)}\%), and MCubeS (50.99{\small (+1.51)}\%) datasets. And our ShareCMP (w/o PGA) achieves competitive or even higher performance on other RGB-X datasets compared to the corresponding state-of-the-art RGB-X methods. The code and datasets are available at https://github.com/LEFTeyex/ShareCMP.