  The topic of semantic segmentation has witnessed considerable progress due to
the powerful features learned by convolutional neural networks (CNNs). The
current leading approaches for semantic segmentation exploit shape information
by extracting CNN features from masked image regions. This strategy introduces
artificial boundaries on the images and may impact the quality of the extracted
features. Besides, the operations on the raw image domain require to compute
thousands of networks on a single image, which is time-consuming. In this
paper, we propose to exploit shape information via masking convolutional
features. The proposal segments (e.g., super-pixels) are treated as masks on
the convolutional feature maps. The CNN features of segments are directly
masked out from these maps and used to train classifiers for recognition. We
further propose a joint method to handle objects and "stuff" (e.g., grass, sky,
water) in the same framework. State-of-the-art results are demonstrated on
benchmarks of PASCAL VOC and new PASCAL-CONTEXT, with a compelling
computational speed.
