Multimodal Recurrent Neural Networks with Information Transfer Layers for Indoor Scene Labeling

This paper proposes a new method called multimodal recurrent neural networks (RNNs) for RGB-D scene semantic segmentation. It is optimized to classify image pixels given two input sources: RGB color channels and depth maps. It simultaneously performs training of two RNNs that are crossly connected through information transfer layers, which are learnt to adaptively extract relevant cross-modality features. Each RNN model learns its representations from its own previous hidden states and transferred patterns from the other RNNs previous hidden states; thus, both model-specific and cross-modality features are retained. We exploit the structure of quad-directional 2D-RNNs to model the short- and long-range contextual information in the 2D input image. We carefully designed various baselines to efficiently examine our proposed model structure. We test our multimodal RNNs method on popular RGB-D benchmarks and show how it outperforms previous methods significantly and achieves competitive results with other state-of-the-art works.