  Semantic object parsing is a fundamental task for understanding objects in
detail in computer vision community, where incorporating multi-level contextual
information is critical for achieving such fine-grained pixel-level
recognition. Prior methods often leverage the contextual information through
post-processing predicted confidence maps. In this work, we propose a novel
deep Local-Global Long Short-Term Memory (LG-LSTM) architecture to seamlessly
incorporate short-distance and long-distance spatial dependencies into the
feature learning over all pixel positions. In each LG-LSTM layer, local
guidance from neighboring positions and global guidance from the whole image
are imposed on each position to better exploit complex local and global
contextual information. Individual LSTMs for distinct spatial dimensions are
also utilized to intrinsically capture various spatial layouts of semantic
parts in the images, yielding distinct hidden and memory cells of each position
for each dimension. In our parsing approach, several LG-LSTM layers are stacked
and appended to the intermediate convolutional layers to directly enhance
visual features, allowing network parameters to be learned in an end-to-end
way. The long chains of sequential computation by stacked LG-LSTM layers also
enable each pixel to sense a much larger region for inference benefiting from
the memorization of previous dependencies in all positions along all
dimensions. Comprehensive evaluations on three public datasets well demonstrate
the significant superiority of our LG-LSTM over other state-of-the-art methods.
