Exploiting Semantic Relations for Glass Surface Detection

Glass surfaces are omnipresent in our daily lives and often go unnoticed by the majority of us. While humans are generally able to infer their locations and thus avoid collisions, it can be difficult for current object detection systems to handle them due to the transparent nature of glass surfaces. Previous methods approached the problem by extracting global context information to obtain priors such as object boundaries and reflections. However, their performances cannot be guaranteed when these deterministic features are not available. We observe that humans often reason through the semantic context of the environment, which offers insights into the categories of and proximity between entities that are expected to appear in the surrounding. For example, the odds of co-occurrence of glass windows with walls and curtains are generally higher than that with other objects such as cars and trees, which have relatively less semantic relevance. Based on this observation, we propose a model ('GlassSemNet') that integrates the contextual relationship of the scenes for glass surface detection with two novel modules: (1) Scene Aware Activation (SAA) Module to adaptively filter critical channels with respect to spatial and semantic features, and (2) Context Correlation Attention (CCA) Module to progressively learn the contextual correlations among objects both spatially and semantically. In addition, we propose a large-scale glass surface detection dataset named {\it Glass Surface Detection - Semantics} ('GSD-S'), which contains 4,519 real-world RGB glass surface images from diverse real-world scenes with detailed annotations for both glass surface detection and semantic segmentation. Experimental results show that our model outperforms contemporary works, especially with 42.6\% MAE improvement on our proposed GSD-S dataset. Code, dataset, and models are available at https://jiaying.link/neurips2022-gsds/