  Today's deep learning systems deliver high performance based on end-to-end
training. While they deliver strong performance, these systems are hard to
interpret. To address this issue, we propose Semantic Bottleneck Networks
(SBN): deep networks with semantically interpretable intermediate layers that
all downstream results are based on. As a consequence, the analysis on what the
final prediction is based on is transparent to the engineer and failure cases
and modes can be analyzed and avoided by high-level reasoning. We present a
case study on street scene segmentation to demonstrate the feasibility and
power of SBN. In particular, we start from a well performing classic deep
network which we adapt to house a SB-Layer containing task related semantic
concepts (such as object-parts and materials). Importantly, we can recover
state of the art performance despite a drastic dimensionality reduction from
1000s (non-semantic feature) to 10s (semantic concept) channels. Additionally
we show how the activations of the SB-Layer can be used for both the
interpretation of failure cases of the network as well as for confidence
prediction of the resulting output. For the first time, e.g., we show
interpretable segmentation results for most predictions at over 99% accuracy.
