LisseMars: A Lightweight Semantic Segmentation Model for Mars Helicopter

With the continuous deepening of Mars exploration missions, the Mars helicopter has become a key platform for acquiring high-resolution near-ground imagery. However, accurate semantic segmentation of the Martian surface remains challenging due to complex terrain morphology, sandstorm interference, and the limited onboard computational resources that restrict real-time processing. Existing models either introduce high computational overhead unsuitable for deployment on Mars aerial platforms or fail to jointly capture fine-grained local texture and global contextual structure information. To address these limitations, we propose LisseMars, a lightweight semantic segmentation network designed for efficient onboard perception. The model integrates a Window Movable Attention (WMA) module for enhanced global context extraction and a multi-convolutional feedforward module (CFFN) to strengthen local detail representation. A Dynamic Polygon Convolution (DPC) module is further introduced to improve segmentation performance on geometrically heterogeneous objects, while a Group Fusion Module (GFM) enables effective multi-scale semantic integration. Extensive experiments are conducted on both real Tianwen-1 Mars helicopter imagery and synthetic datasets. The results show that our method achieved a mean IoU of 78.56% with only 0.12 MB of model parameters, validating the effectiveness of the proposed framework. The real-time performance of proposed method on edge device deployment further demonstrate potential application for real Mars airborne missions.

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Publication Details

Journal
Aerospace
Published
2025-11-25
DOI
https://doi.org/10.3390/aerospace12121049
Primary Topic
Planetary Science and Exploration
Type
article
Field-Weighted Citation Impact
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article

LisseMars: A Lightweight Semantic Segmentation Model for Mars Helicopter

Xiang‐Yu Huang, Hutao Cui, Q. X. Li, Xueming Xiao et al.
Aerospace
Planetary Science and Exploration
article

LisseMars: A Lightweight Semantic Segmentation Model for Mars Helicopter

Xiang‐Yu Huang, Hutao Cui, Q. X. Li, Xueming Xiao, Meibao Yao, Fei Wang, Boyu Lin, Bo Zheng, Yifan Qi
article en

Abstract

With the continuous deepening of Mars exploration missions, the Mars helicopter has become a key platform for acquiring high-resolution near-ground imagery. However, accurate semantic segmentation of the Martian surface remains challenging due to complex terrain morphology, sandstorm interference, and the limited onboard computational resources that restrict real-time processing. Existing models either introduce high computational overhead unsuitable for deployment on Mars aerial platforms or fail to jointly capture fine-grained local texture and global contextual structure information. To address these limitations, we propose LisseMars, a lightweight semantic segmentation network designed for efficient onboard perception. The model integrates a Window Movable Attention (WMA) module for enhanced global context extraction and a multi-convolutional feedforward module (CFFN) to strengthen local detail representation. A Dynamic Polygon Convolution (DPC) module is further introduced to improve segmentation performance on geometrically heterogeneous objects, while a Group Fusion Module (GFM) enables effective multi-scale semantic integration. Extensive experiments are conducted on both real Tianwen-1 Mars helicopter imagery and synthetic datasets. The results show that our method achieved a mean IoU of 78.56% with only 0.12 MB of model parameters, validating the effectiveness of the proposed framework. The real-time performance of proposed method on edge device deployment further demonstrate potential application for real Mars airborne missions.

AerospaceVol. 12(12)
Changchun University of Science and Technology (CN), Jilin University (CN), Harbin Institute of Technology (CN), Changchun University (CN)
Openalex Percentile: Top 75%
Planetary Science and Exploration
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