A new CNN-based semantic object segmentation for autonomous vehicles in urban traffic scenes

Abstract Semantic segmentation is the most important stage of making sense of the visual traffic scene for autonomous driving. In recent years, convolutional neural networks (CNN)-based methods for semantic segmentation of urban traffic scenes are among the trending studies. However, the methods developed in the studies carried out so far are insufficient in terms of accuracy performance criteria. In this study, a new CNN-based semantic segmentation method with higher accuracy performance is proposed. A new module, the Attentional Atrous Feature Pooling (AAFP) Module, has been developed for the proposed method. This module is located between the encoder and decoder in the general network structure and aims to obtain multi-scale information and add attentional features to large and small objects. As a result of experimental tests with the CamVid data set, an accuracy value of approximately 2% higher was achieved with a mIoU value of 70.59% compared to other state-of-art methods. Therefore, the proposed method can semantically segment objects in the urban traffic scene better than other methods.