M-SKSNet: Multi-Scale Spatial Kernel Selection for Image Segmentation of Damaged Road Markings

It is a challenging task to accurately segment damaged road markings from images, mainly due to their fragmented, dense, small-scale, and blurry nature. This study proposes a multi-scale spatial kernel selection net named M-SKSNet, a novel model that integrates a transformer and a multi-dilated large kernel convolutional neural network (MLKC) block to address these issues. Through integrating multiple scales of information, the model can extract high-quality and semantically rich features while generating damage-specific representations. This is achieved by leveraging both the local and global contexts, as well as self-attention mechanisms. The performance of M-SKSNet is evaluated both quantitatively and qualitatively, and the results show that M-SKSNet achieved the highest improvement in F1 by 3.77% and in IOU by 4.6%, when compared to existing models. Additionally, the effectiveness of M-SKSNet in accurately extracting damaged road markings from images in various complex scenarios (including city roads and highways) is demonstrated. Furthermore, M-SKSNet is found to outperform existing alternatives in terms of both robustness and accuracy.