SegMarsViT: Lightweight Mars Terrain Segmentation Network for Autonomous Driving in Planetary Exploration

Planetary rover systems need to perform terrain segmentation to identify feasible driving areas and surround obstacles, which falls into the research area of semantic segmentation. Recently, deep learning (DL)-based methods were proposed and achieved great performance for semantic segmentation. However, due to the on-board processor platform’s strict comstraints on computational complexity and power consumption, existing DL approaches are almost impossible to be deployed on satellites under the burden of extensive computation and large model size. To fill this gap, this paper targeted studying effective and efficient Martian terrain segmentation solutions that are suitable for on-board satellites. In this article, we propose a lightweight ViT-based terrain segmentation method, namely, SegMarsViT. In the encoder part, the mobile vision transformer (MViT) block in the backbone extracts local–global spatial and captures multiscale contextual information concurrently. In the decoder part, the cross-scale feature fusion modules (CFF) further integrate hierarchical context information and the compact feature aggregation module (CFA) combines multi-level feature representation. Moreover, we evaluate the proposed method on three public datasets: AI4Mars, MSL-Seg, and S5Mars. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed SegMarsViT was able to achieve 68.4%, 78.22%, and 67.28% mIoU on the AI4Mars-MSL, MSL-Seg, and S5Mars, respectively, under the speed of 69.52 FPS.