DHAG-Net: A Small Object Semantic Segmentation Network Integrating Edge Supervision and Dense Hybrid Dilated Convolution

Small-object semantic segmentation remains challenging in urban driving scenes due to limited pixel occupancy, blurred boundaries, and the constraints imposed by lightweight deployment. To address these issues, this paper presents a lightweight semantic segmentation framework that enhances boundary awareness and contextual representation while maintaining computational efficiency. The proposed method integrates an edge-supervised boundary gating module to emphasize object boundaries, an efficient multi-scale context aggregation strategy to mitigate scale variation, and a lightweight feature enhancement mechanism for effective feature fusion. Edge supervision is introduced as an auxiliary regularization signal and does not require additional manual annotations. Extensive experiments conducted on multiple benchmark datasets, including Cityscapes, CamVid, PASCAL VOC 2012, and IDDA, demonstrate that the proposed framework consistently improves segmentation performance, particularly for small-object categories, while preserving a favorable balance between accuracy and efficiency.