DAS-SK: An Adaptive Model Integrating Dual Atrous Separable and Selective Kernel CNN for Agriculture Semantic Segmentation

TL;DR

DAS-SK is a lightweight, adaptive CNN architecture that combines dual atrous separable and selective kernel convolutions to improve multi-scale feature learning for high-resolution agricultural image segmentation, achieving state-of-the-art results efficiently.

Contribution

This work introduces DAS-SK, a novel model integrating selective kernel convolution into dual atrous separable modules, enhancing multi-scale feature extraction while reducing computational costs.

Findings

Achieves state-of-the-art accuracy on three agricultural benchmarks.

Uses up to 21x fewer parameters and 19x fewer GFLOPs than transformer-based models.

Demonstrates robustness and efficiency suitable for real-time deployment in agricultural robotics.

Abstract

Semantic segmentation in high-resolution agricultural imagery demands models that strike a careful balance between accuracy and computational efficiency to enable deployment in practical systems. In this work, we propose DAS-SK, a novel lightweight architecture that retrofits selective kernel convolution (SK-Conv) into the dual atrous separable convolution (DAS-Conv) module to strengthen multi-scale feature learning. The model further enhances the atrous spatial pyramid pooling (ASPP) module, enabling the capture of fine-grained local structures alongside global contextual information. Built upon a modified DeepLabV3 framework with two complementary backbones - MobileNetV3-Large and EfficientNet-B3, the DAS-SK model mitigates limitations associated with large dataset requirements, limited spectral generalization, and the high computational cost that typically restricts deployment on UAVs and other edge devices. Comprehensive experiments across three benchmarks: LandCover.ai, VDD, and PhenoBench, demonstrate that DAS-SK consistently achieves state-of-the-art performance, while being more efficient than CNN-, transformer-, and hybrid-based competitors. Notably, DAS-SK requires up to 21x fewer parameters and 19x fewer GFLOPs than top-performing transformer models. These findings establish DAS-SK as a robust, efficient, and scalable solution for real-time agricultural robotics and high-resolution remote sensing, with strong potential for broader deployment in other vision domains.