Continual learning for Binary Foreground and Background Segmentation



Abstract

Continual learning is of great importance for autonomous agents since it is impossible to provide the artificial intelligent with all the knowledge it need in the real world. While previous work has proposed a large amount of continual learning methods, little research has been done on the segmentation task. For autonomous mobile robots, the differentiation of foreground and background matters a lot for the safety consideration. Therefore, we aim to solve the continual learning for binary foreground and background segmentation task. To mitigate catastrophic forgetting, the biggest problem of continual learning, we totally implement five continual learning methods including fine-tuning (baseline), output distillation, feature distillation, EWC and Progress & Compress. Apart from the naive fine-tuning, the last four methods all adopt techniques to preserve the old knowledge. The first three add regularization terms on the output space, feature space and weight space respectively. The last one reuses the old parameters with a layerwise lateral connection in the model architecture. We evaluate and compare those methods on NYU and CLA dataset of different types of scene. The result demonstrates that continual learning methods can prevent catastrophic forgetting to a certain degree only when the old scene and new scene are similar. When two scenes differ a lot, the regularization-based methods may not be a good choice.

Thesis: [PDF]       Code: [GitHub]

Pipeline of methods

Experiment Results