DELFormer: detail-enhanced lightweight transformer for road segmentation

Abstract. The road segmentation task has become increasingly important in fields such as urban planning, traffic management, and environmental monitoring. However, most existing deep learning-based methods suffer from issues such as poor temporal effectiveness and connectivity, making it a significant challenge to achieve high-precision and high-efficiency road segmentation. We propose a road segmentation model based on a detail-enhanced lightweight transformer. Through the connectivity enhancement module, the issue of spatial information loss is addressed, enhancing the modeling capability of the road network connectivity. The model incorporates a detail-enhancement strategy to capture the relationship between roads and the environment, enhancing the perception and expression of details while maintaining low computational complexity. Furthermore, the use of a lightweight multiple feature fusion module promotes information fusion from features at different scales while a maintaining lightweight design. Extensive experiments on two publicly available datasets demonstrate that our method achieves the best performance in terms of real-time effectiveness and accuracy.