Improved SegFormer with Guided Multi-Scale Fusion and Boundary-Aware Attention for Slippery Road Recognition

Accurate and timely identification of slippery road surfaces is essential for ensuring driving safety and operational efficiency on highways. However, blurred vehicle-background boundaries, uneven illumination, and water splashing caused by passing vehicles make existing image-based recognition methods prone to low accuracy. To address these challenges, this paper proposes an improved SegFormer-based framework with two task-specific innovations: (1) a novel Guided Multi-scale Fusion (GMF) module for task-guided multi-scale feature integration, designed to incorporate auxiliary information such as vehicle type, relative speed, and splash regions, enabling the network to focus on slipperiness-relevant road areas while suppressing background interference; and (2) an improved Boundary Attention Awareness (BAA) module with directional Sobel-based boundary initialization, which provides explicit geometric priors to preserve fine boundary details and reduce ambiguity in slippery regions with irregular or weak edges. A multi-scale input and enhancement strategy is further adopted, along with a weighted combination of cross-entropy loss and Dice loss to mitigate class imbalance. Experimental results on our self-constructed Guangzhou Beierhuan Expressway dataset achieve an mIoU of 95.80%, accuracy of 97.84%, and F1-score of 97.86%. To verify cross-domain generalization, we further evaluate the model on two additional benchmarks: it achieves an mIoU of 93.51% on the synthetic SYN-UDTIRI dataset, and attains an mIoU of 95.80% with an AmIoU of 76.20% on the public Cityscapes dataset, achieving competitive performance against several mainstream architectures. The proposed method offers considerable application potential for highway safety warning systems.