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.
Authors
- Xiang‐Yu Huang (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6372-5998)
- Hutao Cui
- Q. X. Li (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8000-3695)
- Xueming Xiao (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6511-0524)
- Meibao Yao (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7069-6782)
- Fei Wang (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8432-0009)
- Boyu Lin (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0009-0003-3495-3707)
- Bo Zheng (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6630-7396)
- Yifan Qi
Institutions
- Changchun University of Science and Technology (CN)
- Jilin University (CN)
- Harbin Institute of Technology (CN)
- Changchun University (CN)
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
- 0.00