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.

我们提出了一种新颖的轻量级分割架构，名为多尺度特征传播网络 (MFPNet)，通过设计具有柔性瓶颈残差模块的鲁棒的编码器-解码器结构，探索深入且丰富的多尺度语义上下文，同时利用图卷积网络 (GCNs)，在瓶颈残差模块之间进行多尺度特征传播，最终在基准数据集上表现出优异的分割结果。

MFPNet: 轻量级语义分割的多尺度特征传播网络