Multiscale Meets Spatial Awareness: An Efficient Attention Guidance Network for Human Parsing

Human parsing, which aims at resolving human body and clothes into semantic part regions from an human image, is a fundamental task in human-centric analysis. Recently, the approaches for human parsing based on deep convolutional neural networks (DCNNs) have made significant progress. However, hierarchically exploiting multiscale and spatial contexts as convolutional features is still a hurdle to overcome. In order to boost the scale and spatial awareness of a DCNN, we propose two effective structures, named “Attention SPP and Attention RefineNet,” to form a Mutual Attention operation, to exploit multiscale and spatial semantics different from the existing approaches. Moreover, we propose a novel Attention Guidance Network (AG-Net), a simple yet effective architecture without using bells and whistles (such as human pose and edge information), to address human parsing tasks. Comprehensive evaluations on two public datasets well demonstrate that the AG-Net outperforms the state-of-the-art networks.