Body: <p>When I label images for semantic segmentation (using u-net, if that matters), is labeling the background (anything I am not interested in) necessary? Will it improve the network's performance?</p>
  
Comments.ContentLicense: CC BY-SA 4.0
Comments.CreationDate: 2020-07-09T17:09:39.040Z
Comments.Text: I am not sure I understand your concern. In image segmentation, you want to label each pixel. So, you will have the labels for each of your objects of interest. I think the remaining objects will just be considered _background_. If you explicitly label the background, then I suspect that this could mean that you force the background to look in a certain way, but I am not sure about the implications. To be honest, I am not sure what the [benchmark datasets like COCO](https://cocodataset.org) do. You may want to investigate that.
Comments.UserDisplayName: nbro
Comments.ContentLicense: CC BY-SA 4.0
Comments.CreationDate: 2020-07-09T17:17:30.033Z
Comments.Text: Maybe this dataset [ADE20K](https://groups.csail.mit.edu/vision/datasets/ADE20K/) is worth investigating too.
Comments.UserDisplayName: nbro
Comments.ContentLicense: CC BY-SA 4.0
Comments.CreationDate: 2020-07-09T23:15:57.787Z
Comments.Text: Thanks, that's interesting. I'll see if I can find the time to benchmark that
Comments.UserDisplayName: liorr
Tags: <deep-learning><computer-vision><training><image-segmentation><u-net>
Title: Is it necessary to label the background when generating the labelled dataset for semantic segmentation?
UserDisplayName: liorr
ThreadText: # Is it necessary to label the background when generating the labelled dataset for semantic segmentation?
  
  (Asked by: username_0 on 2020-07-09)
  
  When I label images for semantic segmentation (using u-net, if that matters), is labeling the background (anything I am not interested in) necessary? Will it improve the network's performance?
  
  **Tags:** deep-learning, computer-vision, training, image-segmentation, u-net
  
  > **Comments:**
  > **username_1**: I am not sure I understand your concern. In image segmentation, you want to label each pixel. So, you will have the labels for each of your objects of interest. I think the remaining objects will just be considered _background_. If you explicitly label the background, then I suspect that this could mean that you force the background to look in a certain way, but I am not sure about the implications. To be honest, I am not sure what the [benchmark datasets like COCO](https://cocodataset.org) do. You may want to investigate that.  
  > **username_1**: Maybe this dataset [ADE20K](https://groups.csail.mit.edu/vision/datasets/ADE20K/) is worth investigating too.  
  > **username_0**: Thanks, that's interesting. I'll see if I can find the time to benchmark that  
  
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  ## 0 answers
  
  