Strip Pooling: Rethinking Spatial Pooling for Scene Parsing

Spatial pooling has been proven highly effective to capture long-range contextual information for pixel-wise prediction tasks, such as scene parsing. In this paper, beyond conventional spatial pooling that usually has a regular shape of NxN, we rethink the formulation of spatial pooling by introducing a new pooling strategy, called strip pooling, which considers a long but narrow kernel, i.e., 1xN or Nx1. Based on strip pooling, we further investigate spatial pooling architecture design by 1) introducing a new strip pooling module that enables backbone networks to efficiently model long-range dependencies; 2) presenting a novel building block with diverse spatial pooling as a core; and 3) systematically…