Off-Road Autonomous Vehicle Semantic Segmentation and Spatial Overlay Video Assembly

Autonomous systems are expanding rapidly, driving a demand for robust perception technologies capable of navigating challenging, unstructured environments. While urban autonomy has made significant progress, off-road environments pose unique challenges, including dynamic terrain and limited communication infrastructure. This research addresses these challenges by introducing a novel three-part solution for off-road autonomous vehicles. First, we present a large-scale off-road dataset curated to capture the visual complexity and variability of unstructured environments, providing a realistic training ground that supports improved model generalization. Second, we propose a Confusion-Aware Loss (CAL) that dynamically penalizes systematic misclassifications based on class-level confusion statistics. When combined with cross-entropy, CAL improves segmentation mean Intersection over Union (mIoU) on the off-road test set from 68.66% to 70.06% and achieves cross-domain gains of up to ~0.49% mIoU on the Cityscapes dataset. Third, leveraging semantic segmentation as an intermediate representation, we introduce a spatial overlay video encoding scheme that preserves high-fidelity RGB information in semantically critical regions while compressing non-essential background regions. Experimental results demonstrate Peak Signal-to-Noise Ratio (PSNR) improvements of up to +5 dB and Video Multi-Method Assessment Fusion (VMAF) gains of up to +40 points under lossy compression, enabling efficient and reliable off-road autonomous operation. This integrated approach provides a robust framework for real-time remote operation in bandwidth-constrained environments.