A Deep Learning-Based Semantic Segmentation Architecture for Autonomous Driving Applications

In recent years, the development of smart transportation has accelerated research on semantic segmentation as it is one of the most important problems in this area. A large receptive field has always been the center of focus when designing convolutional neural networks for semantic segmentation. A majority of recent techniques have used maxpooling to increase the receptive field of a network at an expense of decreasing its spatial resolution. Although this idea has shown improved results in object detection applications, however, when it comes to semantic segmentation, a high spatial resolution also needs to be considered. To address this issue, a new deep learning model, the M-Net is proposed in this paper which satisfies both high spatial resolution and a large enough receptive field while keeping the size of the model to a minimum. The proposed network is based on an encoder-decoder architecture. The encoder uses atrous convolution to encode the features at full resolution, and instead of using heavy transposed convolution, the decoder consists of a multipath feature extraction module that can extract multiscale context information from the encoded features. The experimental results reported in the paper demonstrate the viability of the proposed scheme