Dual-Branch Superpixel and Class-Center Attention Network for Efficient Semantic Segmentation

With the advancement of deep learning, image semantic segmentation has achieved remarkable progress. However, the complexity and real-time requirements of practical applications pose greater challenges for segmentation algorithms. To address these, we propose a dual-branch network guided by attention mechanisms that tackles common limitations in existing methods, such as coarse edge segmentation, insufficient contextual understanding, and high computational overhead. Specifically, we introduce a superpixel sampling weighting module that models pixel dependencies based on different regional affiliations, thereby enhancing the network's sensitivity to object boundaries while preserving local features. Furthermore, a class-center attention module is designed to extract class-centered features and facilitate category-aware modeling. This module reduces the computational overhead and redundancy of traditional self-attention mechanisms, thereby improving the network's global feature representation. Additionally, learnable parameters are employed to adaptively fuse features from both branches, enabling the network to better focus on critical information. We validate our method on three benchmark datasets (PASCAL VOC 2012, Cityscapes, and ADE20K) by comparing it with mainstream models including FCN, DeepLabV3+, and DANet, with evaluation metrics of mIoU and PA. Our method delivers superior segmentation performance in these experiments. These results underscore the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm in balancing segmentation accuracy and model efficiency.