Class-Incremental Learning for Semantic Segmentation - A study

One of the main challenges of applying deep learning for robotics is the difficulty of efficiently adapting to new tasks while still maintaining the same performance on previous tasks. The problem of incrementally learning new tasks commonly struggles with catastrophic forgetting in which the previous knowledge is lost.Class-incremental learning for semantic segmentation, addresses this problem in which we want to learn new semantic classes without having access to labeled data for previously learned classes. This is a problem in industry, where few pre-trained models and open datasets matches exactly the requisites. In these cases it is both expensive and labour intensive to collect an entirely new fully-labeled dataset. Instead, collecting a smaller dataset and only labeling the new classes is much more efficient in terms of data collection.In this paper we present the class-incremental learning problem for semantic segmentation, we discuss related work in terms of the more thoroughly studied classification task and experimentally validate the current state-of-the-art for semantic segmentation. This lays the foundation as we discuss some of the problems that still needs to be investigated and improved upon in order to reach a new state-of-the-art for class-incremental semantic segmentation.