Image-free single-pixel segmentation

The existing segmentation techniques require high-fidelity images as input to perform semantic segmentation. Since the segmentation results contain most of edge information that is much less than the acquired images, the throughput gap leads to both hardware and software waste. In this paper, we report an image-free single-pixel segmentation technique. The technique combines structured illumination and single-pixel detection together, to efficiently sample and multiplex scene’s segmentation information into compressed one-dimensional measurements. The illumination patterns are optimized together with the subsequent reconstruction neural network, which directly infers segmentation maps from the single-pixel measurements. The end-to-end encoding-and-decoding learning framework enables optimized illumination with corresponding network, which provides both high acquisition and segmentation efficiency. Both simulation and experimental results validate that accurate segmentation can be achieved using two-order-of-magnitude less input data. When the sampling ratio is 1%, the Dice coefficient reaches above 80% and the pixel accuracy reaches above 96%. We envision that this image-free segmentation technique can be widely applied in various resource-limited platforms such as Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) and autonomous vehicle that require real-time sensing. • An image-free segmentation method infers segmentation results from 1-D measurements. • The optimized patterns improved the system’s acquisition and segmentation efficiency. • Experimental results show accurate segmentation can be achieved at 1% sampling ratio.