An Intelligent Semantic Segmentation Network for Unmanned Surface Vehicle Navigation

With the development of artificial intelligence neural networks, semantic segmentation has received more and more attention in the field of ocean engineering, especially in the fields of unmanned vessels and drones. However, challenges such as limited open ocean datasets, insufficient feature extraction for segmentation networks, pixel pairing problem, and frequency-domain obfuscation still exist. To address these issues, we propose USVS-Net, a high-performance segmentation network for segmenting USV feasible domains and surface obstacles. To overcome the pixel pairing confusion problem, a Global Channel-Spatial Attention module (GCSA) is designed in this paper, which enhances feature interactions, suppresses redundant features, and improves pixel matching accuracy through channel shuffling strategy and large kernel spatial attention. In addition, a median-enhanced channel-spatial attention (MECS) module is proposed to enhance edge details and suppress noise by fusing the median, mean, and maximum values to facilitate cross-scale feature interactions. For evaluation, a dataset USV-DATA containing images of marine obstacles is constructed. Experiments show that USVS-Net outperforms SOTA with mIoU reaching 81.71% and mPA reaching 90.18%, which is a significant improvement over the previous methods. These findings indicate that USVS-Net has high accuracy and robustness and can provide valuable support for autonomous navigation of unmanned vessels.