  Recurrent neural networks (RNNs) have shown the ability to improve scene
parsing through capturing long-range dependencies among image units. In this
paper, we propose dense RNNs for scene labeling by exploring various long-range
semantic dependencies among image units. Different from existing RNN based
approaches, our dense RNNs are able to capture richer contextual dependencies
for each image unit by enabling immediate connections between each pair of
image units, which significantly enhances their discriminative power. Besides,
to select relevant dependencies and meanwhile to restrain irrelevant ones for
each unit from dense connections, we introduce an attention model into dense
RNNs. The attention model allows automatically assigning more importance to
helpful dependencies while less weight to unconcerned dependencies. Integrating
with convolutional neural networks (CNNs), we develop an end-to-end scene
labeling system. Extensive experiments on three large-scale benchmarks
demonstrate that the proposed approach can improve the baselines by large
margins and outperform other state-of-the-art algorithms.
