Optimizing the computational efficiency of the artificial neural networks is crucial for resource-constrained platforms like autonomous driving systems. To address this challenge, we proposed a Lightweight Context-aware Network (LCNet) that accelerates semantic segmentation while maintaining a favorable trade-off between inference speed and segmentation accuracy in this paper. The proposed LCNet introduces a partial-channel transformation (PCT) strategy to minimize computing latency and hardware requirements of the basic unit. Within the PCT block, a three-branch context aggregation (TCA) module expands the feature receptive fields, capturing multiscale contextual information. Additionally, a dual-attention-guided decoder (DD) recovers spatial details and enhances pixel prediction accuracy. Extensive experiments on three benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed LCNet model. Remarkably, a smaller model LCNet $_{3\_{}7}$ achieves 73.8% mIoU with only 0.51 million parameters, with an impressive inference speed of $\sim $ 142.5 fps and $\sim $ 9 fps using a single RTX 3090 GPU and Jetson Xavier NX, respectively, on the Cityscapes test set at $1024\times 1024$ resolution. A more accurate version of the LCNet $_{3\_{}11}$ can achieve 75.8% mIoU with 0.74 million parameters at $\sim $ 117 fps inference speed on Cityscapes at the same resolution. Much faster inference speed can be achieved at smaller image resolutions. LCNet strikes a great balance between computational efficiency and prediction capability for mobile application scenarios. The code is available at https://github.com/lztjy/LCNet.


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    Title :

    Lightweight Context-Aware Network Using Partial-Channel Transformation for Real-Time Semantic Segmentation


    Contributors:
    Shi, Min (author) / Lin, Shaowen (author) / Yi, Qingming (author) / Weng, Jian (author) / Luo, Aiwen (author) / Zhou, Yicong (author)


    Publication date :

    2024-07-01


    Size :

    5850625 byte




    Type of media :

    Article (Journal)


    Type of material :

    Electronic Resource


    Language :

    English