MFPNet: Multi-scale Feature Propagation Network For Lightweight Semantic Segmentation

In contrast to the abundant research focusing on large-scale models, the progress in lightweight semantic segmentation appears to be advancing at a comparatively slower pace. However, existing compact methods often suffer from limited feature representation capability due to the shallowness of their networks. In this paper, we propose a novel lightweight segmentation architecture, called Multi-scale Feature Propagation Network (MFPNet), to address the dilemma. Specifically, we design a robust Encoder-Decoder structure featuring symmetrical residual blocks that consist of flexible bottleneck residual modules (BRMs) to explore deep and rich muti-scale semantic context. Furthermore, taking benefit from their capacity to model latent long-range contextual relationships, we leverage Graph Convolutional Networks (GCNs) to facilitate multi-scale feature propagation between the BRM blocks. When evaluated on benchmark datasets, our proposed approach shows superior segmentation results.

Lightweight Real-time Semantic Segmentation Network with Efficient Transformer and CNN

In the past decade, convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have shown prominence for semantic segmentation. Although CNN models have very impressive performance, the ability to capture global representation is still insufficient, which results in suboptimal results. Recently, Transformer achieved huge success in NLP tasks, demonstrating its advantages in modeling long-range dependency. Recently, Transformer has also attracted tremendous attention from computer vision researchers who reformulate the image processing tasks as a sequence-to-sequence prediction but resulted in deteriorating local feature details. In this work, we propose a lightweight real-time semantic segmentation network called LETNet. LETNet combines a U-shaped CNN with Transformer effectively in a capsule embedding style to compensate for respective deficiencies. Meanwhile, the elaborately designed Lightweight Dilated Bottleneck (LDB) module and Feature Enhancement (FE) module cultivate a positive impact on training from scratch simultaneously. Extensive experiments performed on challenging datasets demonstrate that LETNet achieves superior performances in accuracy and efficiency balance. Specifically, It only contains 0.95M parameters and 13.6G FLOPs but yields 72.8\% mIoU at 120 FPS on the Cityscapes test set and 70.5\% mIoU at 250 FPS on the CamVid test dataset using a single RTX 3090 GPU. The source code will be available at https://github.com/IVIPLab/LETNet.

FBSNet: A Fast Bilateral Symmetrical Network for Real-Time Semantic Segmentation

Real-time semantic segmentation, which can be visually understood as the pixel-level classification task on the input image, currently has broad application prospects, especially in the fast-developing fields of autonomous driving and drone navigation. However, the huge burden of calculation together with redundant parameters are still the obstacles to its technological development. In this paper, we propose a Fast Bilateral Symmetrical Network (FBSNet) to alleviate the above challenges. Specifically, FBSNet employs a symmetrical encoder-decoder structure with two branches, semantic information branch, and spatial detail branch. The semantic information branch is the main branch with deep network architecture to acquire the contextual information of the input image and meanwhile acquire sufficient receptive field. While spatial detail branch is a shallow and simple network used to establish local dependencies of each pixel for preserving details, which is essential for restoring the original resolution during the decoding phase. Meanwhile, a feature aggregation module (FAM) is designed to effectively combine the output features of the two branches. The experimental results of Cityscapes and CamVid show that the proposed FBSNet can strike a good balance between accuracy and efficiency. Specifically, it obtains 70.9\% and 68.9\% mIoU along with the inference speed of 90 fps and 120 fps on these two test datasets, respectively, with only 0.62 million parameters on a single RTX 2080Ti GPU.

MSCFNet: A Lightweight Network With Multi-Scale Context Fusion for Real-Time Semantic Segmentation

In recent years, how to strike a good trade-off between accuracy and inference speed has become the core issue for real-time semantic segmentation applications, which plays a vital role in real-world scenarios such as autonomous driving systems and drones. In this study, we devise a novel lightweight network using a multi-scale context fusion (MSCFNet) scheme, which explores an asymmetric encoder-decoder architecture to dispose this problem. More specifically, the encoder adopts some developed efficient asymmetric residual (EAR) modules, which are composed of factorization depth-wise convolution and dilation convolution. Meanwhile, instead of complicated computation, simple deconvolution is applied in the decoder to further reduce the amount of parameters while still maintaining high segmentation accuracy. Also, MSCFNet has branches with efficient attention modules from different stages of the network to well capture multi-scale contextual information. Then we combine them before the final classification to enhance the expression of the features and improve the segmentation efficiency. Comprehensive experiments on challenging datasets have demonstrated that the proposed MSCFNet, which contains only 1.15M parameters, achieves 71.9\% Mean IoU on the Cityscapes testing dataset and can run at over 50 FPS on a single Titan XP GPU configuration.