A Large Kernel Convolutional Neural Network with a Noise Transfer Mechanism for Real-Time Semantic Segmentation

In semantic segmentation tasks, large kernels and Atrous convolution have been utilized to increase the receptive field, enabling models to achieve competitive performance with fewer parameters. However, due to the fixed size of kernel functions, networks incorporating large convolutional kernels are limited in adaptively capturing multi-scale features and fail to effectively leverage global contextual information. To address this issue, we combine Atrous convolution with large kernel convolution, using different dilation rates to compensate for the single-scale receptive field limitation of large kernels. Simultaneously, we employ a dynamic selection mechanism to adaptively highlight the most important spatial features based on global information. Additionally, to enhance the model’s ability to fit the true label distribution, we propose a Multi-Scale Contextual Noise Transfer Matrix (NTM), which uses high-order consistency information from neighborhood representations to estimate NTM and correct supervision signals, thereby improving the model’s generalization capability. Extensive experiments conducted on Cityscapes, ADE20K, and COCO-Stuff-10K demonstrate that this approach achieves a new state-of-the-art balance between speed and accuracy. Specifically, LKNTNet achieves 80.05% mIoU on Cityscapes with an inference speed of 80.7 FPS and 42.7% mIoU on ADE20K with an inference speed of 143.6 FPS.