  In this work we address the task of semantic image segmentation with Deep
Learning and make three main contributions that are experimentally shown to
have substantial practical merit. First, we highlight convolution with
upsampled filters, or 'atrous convolution', as a powerful tool in dense
prediction tasks. Atrous convolution allows us to explicitly control the
resolution at which feature responses are computed within Deep Convolutional
Neural Networks. It also allows us to effectively enlarge the field of view of
filters to incorporate larger context without increasing the number of
parameters or the amount of computation. Second, we propose atrous spatial
pyramid pooling (ASPP) to robustly segment objects at multiple scales. ASPP
probes an incoming convolutional feature layer with filters at multiple
sampling rates and effective fields-of-views, thus capturing objects as well as
image context at multiple scales. Third, we improve the localization of object
boundaries by combining methods from DCNNs and probabilistic graphical models.
The commonly deployed combination of max-pooling and downsampling in DCNNs
achieves invariance but has a toll on localization accuracy. We overcome this
by combining the responses at the final DCNN layer with a fully connected
Conditional Random Field (CRF), which is shown both qualitatively and
quantitatively to improve localization performance. Our proposed "DeepLab"
system sets the new state-of-art at the PASCAL VOC-2012 semantic image
segmentation task, reaching 79.7% mIOU in the test set, and advances the
results on three other datasets: PASCAL-Context, PASCAL-Person-Part, and
Cityscapes. All of our code is made publicly available online.
