---
title: "Semantic segmentation research: papers and trends"
description: "From 2017 to 2026 (so far), the keyword “semantic segmentation” appeared in 974 papers in the tracked journals, most of them in AI (958), operations research (5) and information systems (4)."
url: https://scholar4ai.com/keywords/semantic-segmentation
markdown_url: https://scholar4ai.com/keywords/semantic-segmentation.md
license: CC BY-NC 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/)
share_text: "From 2017 to 2026 (so far), the keyword “semantic segmentation” appeared in 974 papers in the tracked journals, most of them in AI (958), operations research (5) and information systems (4). (as of 2026-11-03)"
data_url: https://scholar4ai.com/data/rankings.json
updated: 2026-11-03T18:03:37+09:00
window: 2026-10-05 to 2026-11-03
source: OpenAlex (CC0)
---

# Papers on “semantic segmentation”

Research on “semantic segmentation” in the 480 tracked journals: papers per year and category, the journals, institutions and countries publishing it, the keywords studied with it and its most-cited papers. It is not among the most frequent keywords of the last 30 days, so this page has no list of its latest papers.

Back to the ranking: https://scholar4ai.com/rankings/keywords.md

## Key findings

- From 2017 to 2026 (so far), the keyword “semantic segmentation” appeared in 974 papers in the tracked journals, most of them in AI (958), operations research (5) and information systems (4).
- 195 of them were published in 2025, against 14 in 2017.
- Since 2023, the institutions with the most of these papers were Chinese Academy of Sciences (48), University of Chinese Academy of Sciences (28) and Zhejiang University (26).
- The journals publishing most of them were Expert Systems with Applications (110), Pattern Recognition (101) and IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence (98).
- The most-cited of them is “DeepLab: Semantic Image Segmentation with Deep Convolutional Nets, Atrous Convolution, and Fully Connected CRFs” (IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, 2017), with 22,385 citations.

## Papers per year

*Papers per publication year and category*

| Category | 2017 | 2018 | 2019 | 2020 | 2021 | 2022 | 2023 | 2024 | 2025 | 2026 (so far) |
|---|---:|---:|---:|---:|---:|---:|---:|---:|---:|---:|
| [AI](https://scholar4ai.com/categories/ai.md) | 14 | 16 | 28 | 56 | 86 | 122 | 138 | 149 | 191 | 158 |
| [Operations Research](https://scholar4ai.com/categories/operations-research.md) | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 0 | 0 | 2 | 2 | 0 |
| [Information Systems](https://scholar4ai.com/categories/information-systems.md) | 0 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 0 | 2 | 0 |
| [Economics](https://scholar4ai.com/categories/economics.md) | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 0 | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| [Tourism and Hospitality](https://scholar4ai.com/categories/tourism-and-hospitality.md) | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 1 |
| [Marketing](https://scholar4ai.com/categories/marketing.md) | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 1 |
| [Statistics](https://scholar4ai.com/categories/statistics.md) | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 1 |
| All categories | 14 | 16 | 28 | 57 | 87 | 124 | 139 | 152 | 195 | 162 |

## Where the papers come from

*Journals with the most papers, since 2023*

| # | Journal | Papers |
|---:|---|---:|
| 1 | [Expert Systems with Applications](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/expert-systems-with-applications.md) | 110 |
| 2 | [Pattern Recognition](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/pattern-recognition.md) | 101 |
| 3 | [IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/ieee-transactions-on-pattern-analysis-and-machine-intelligence.md) | 98 |
| 4 | [International Journal of Computer Vision](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/international-journal-of-computer-vision.md) | 64 |
| 5 | [Knowledge-Based Systems](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/knowledge-based-systems.md) | 42 |
| 6 | [Neural Networks](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/neural-networks.md) | 41 |
| 7 | [Information Fusion](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/information-fusion.md) | 39 |
| 8 | [Neural Computing and Applications](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/neural-computing-and-applications.md) | 36 |
| 9 | [IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks and Learning Systems](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/ieee-transactions-on-neural-networks-and-learning-systems.md) | 35 |
| 10 | [Applied Intelligence](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/applied-intelligence.md) | 34 |

*Institutions with the most papers, since 2023*

| # | Institution | Papers |
|---:|---|---:|
| 1 | [Chinese Academy of Sciences](https://scholar4ai.com/institutions/chinese-academy-of-sciences.md) | 48 |
| 2 | [University of Chinese Academy of Sciences](https://scholar4ai.com/institutions/university-of-chinese-academy-of-sciences.md) | 28 |
| 3 | [Zhejiang University](https://scholar4ai.com/institutions/zhejiang-university.md) | 26 |
| 4 | [Peking University](https://scholar4ai.com/institutions/peking-university.md) | 23 |
| 5 | [Wuhan University](https://scholar4ai.com/institutions/wuhan-university.md) | 23 |
| 6 | [Shanghai Jiao Tong University](https://scholar4ai.com/institutions/shanghai-jiao-tong-university.md) | 22 |
| 7 | [Tsinghua University](https://scholar4ai.com/institutions/tsinghua-university.md) | 22 |
| 8 | [Northwestern Polytechnical University](https://scholar4ai.com/institutions/northwestern-polytechnical-university.md) | 20 |
| 9 | [Xidian University](https://scholar4ai.com/institutions/xidian-university.md) | 20 |
| 10 | [Institute of Automation](https://scholar4ai.com/institutions/institute-of-automation.md) | 17 |

*Countries with the most papers, since 2023*

| # | Country | Papers |
|---:|---|---:|
| 1 | China | 498 |
| 2 | United States | 52 |
| 3 | Australia | 46 |
| 4 | United Kingdom | 43 |
| 5 | Hong Kong | 34 |
| 6 | Singapore | 27 |
| 7 | Germany | 24 |
| 8 | India | 19 |
| 9 | South Korea | 19 |
| 10 | Italy | 17 |

*Keywords with the most papers, since 2023*

| # | Keyword | Papers |
|---:|---|---:|
| 1 | [object detection](https://scholar4ai.com/keywords/object-detection.md) | 141 |
| 2 | [image classification](https://scholar4ai.com/keywords/image-classification.md) | 78 |
| 3 | instance segmentation | 44 |
| 4 | [vision transformer](https://scholar4ai.com/keywords/vision-transformer.md) | 40 |
| 5 | [autonomous driving](https://scholar4ai.com/keywords/autonomous-driving.md) | 35 |
| 6 | [knowledge distillation](https://scholar4ai.com/keywords/knowledge-distillation.md) | 29 |
| 7 | [domain generalization](https://scholar4ai.com/keywords/domain-generalization.md) | 27 |
| 8 | infrared and visible image fusion | 27 |
| 9 | [pseudo-labeling](https://scholar4ai.com/keywords/pseudo-labeling.md) | 26 |

## Most-cited papers

*Most-cited papers since 2017*

| # | Citations | Per month | Title | Journal | Published | Authors |
|---:|---:|---:|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 22,385 | 196.0 | [DeepLab: Semantic Image Segmentation with Deep Convolutional Nets, Atrous Convolution, and Fully Connected CRFs](https://doi.org/10.1109/tpami.2017.2699184) | [IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/ieee-transactions-on-pattern-analysis-and-machine-intelligence.md) | 2017-04-27 | Liang-Chieh Chen, George Papandreou, Iasonas Kokkinos et al. |
| 2 | 19,625 | 166.3 | [SegNet: A Deep Convolutional Encoder-Decoder Architecture for Image Segmentation](https://doi.org/10.1109/tpami.2016.2644615) | [IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/ieee-transactions-on-pattern-analysis-and-machine-intelligence.md) | 2017-01-02 | Vijay Badrinarayanan, Alex Kendall, Roberto Cipolla |
| 3 | 4,889 | 61.8 | [Deep High-Resolution Representation Learning for Visual Recognition](https://doi.org/10.1109/tpami.2020.2983686) | [IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/ieee-transactions-on-pattern-analysis-and-machine-intelligence.md) | 2020-04-01 | Jingdong Wang, Ke Sun, Tianheng Cheng et al. |
| 4 | 3,797 | 54.2 | [Image Segmentation Using Deep Learning: A Survey](https://doi.org/10.1109/tpami.2021.3059968) | [IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/ieee-transactions-on-pattern-analysis-and-machine-intelligence.md) | 2021-01-01 | Shervin Minaee, Yuri Y. Boykov, Fatih Porikli et al. |
| 5 | 1,830 | 19.3 | [Semantic Understanding of Scenes Through the ADE20K Dataset](https://doi.org/10.1007/s11263-018-1140-0) | [International Journal of Computer Vision](https://scholar4ai.com/journals/international-journal-of-computer-vision.md) | 2018-12-07 | Bolei Zhou, Hang Zhao, Xavier Puig et al. |

## Cite this page

Scholar4AI. (2026). Papers on “semantic segmentation”. Journal and Conference Research Rankings. Retrieved November 3, 2026, from https://scholar4ai.com/keywords/semantic-segmentation

```bibtex
@misc{scholar4ai-keywords-semantic-segmentation,
  author = {{Scholar4AI}},
  title = {Papers on “semantic segmentation”},
  year = {2026},
  howpublished = {\url{https://scholar4ai.com/keywords/semantic-segmentation}},
  urldate = {2026-11-03},
  note = {Journal and Conference Research Rankings; data from OpenAlex (CC0); licensed CC BY-NC 4.0}
}
```

License: CC BY-NC 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/).