R2KAN-U-Net: A Novel Architecture Integrating Kolmogorov–Arnold Networks with Residual U-Net for Robust Traffic Sign Segmentation

Traffic sign segmentation is a fundamental component of intelligent transportation systems and autonomous driving, where reliable pixel-level perception is required under challenging real-world conditions such as illumination variations, occlusion, scale diversity, and complex urban backgrounds. In this work, we propose Residual–Recurrent Kolmogorov–Arnold Network U-Net (R2KAN-U-Net), where “R2” denotes the integration of residual convolutional learning and recurrent KAN-based feature refinement. The proposed architecture combines residual U-Net feature extraction, multi-scale KAN fusion, and recurrent KAN refinement to improve pixel-level traffic sign segmentation under challenging road-scene conditions. The proposed framework integrates three complementary components: (1) residual convolutional blocks for stable feature propagation; (2) a multi-scale KAN fusion bottleneck for capturing contextual information at different receptive fields; and (3) recurrent KAN refinement modules for iterative enhancement of discriminative features. Unlike conventional convolutional architectures, the proposed KAN-based formulation replaces linear transformations with learnable univariate functions, enabling adaptive nonlinear feature modeling. We conduct extensive experiments on a custom dataset containing 9300 annotated urban traffic scene images, as well as on the ADE20K and Cityscapes benchmarks. On the custom dataset, the proposed R2KAN-U-Net achieved a Dice coefficient of 0.92 and an IoU score of 0.89, providing a strong accuracy–efficiency trade-off for traffic-sign foreground segmentation. It achieves competitive segmentation accuracy compared with recent CNN-, transformer-, and state-space-based segmentation models while using fewer parameters and lower computational cost. Additional low-light experiments demonstrate improved segmentation stability, with R2KAN-U-Net achieving the highest low-light Dice score of 0.88 and a competitive low-light IoU of 0.79. Furthermore, the proposed architecture maintains competitive computational efficiency with only 24 M parameters, 44.8 G FLOPs, and near-real-time inference at 13 ms per image. The experimental results demonstrate that integrating KAN-based function-space learning with residual and multi-scale feature refinement provides an effective and computationally efficient solution for robust traffic sign segmentation in complex driving environments.