PMS-Net: A Real-Time Instance Segmentation Framework with Large Receptive Fields for Urban Driving Scenes

Abstract

With the rapid development of edge AI chips and autonomous driving algorithms, autonomous driving perception systems are evolving toward higher accuracy, lower latency, and lightweight deployment. This trend places greater demands on real-time instance segmentation algorithms in terms of multi-scale feature representation, spatial detail modeling, and edge deployment efficiency. To address these challenges, this paper proposes PMS-Net (Progressive Multi-Scale Network), a network designed for real-time instance segmentation. PMS-Net adopts a progressive multi-scale feature modeling mechanism that progressively enlarges the receptive field while integrating semantic and fine-grained spatial information across different scales. This enables efficient collaboration between local features and global contextual information, thereby enhancing scale-awareness and feature representation while maintaining a lightweight architecture. In addition, efficient feature encoding and dynamic feature reconstruction are incorporated to further improve spatial alignment, boundary recovery, and semantic continuity for complex scene modeling. Experimental results show that PMS-Net achieves 36.7% Mask mAP50 and 175 FPS on the Cityscapes dataset, outperforming the baseline by 2.9%. Deployment experiments on the NVIDIA Jetson Orin NX platform further demonstrate that PMS-Net achieves 35.2% Mask mAP50 and 98 FPS, improving the baseline by 3.7% and 14.0%, respectively. These results validate the effectiveness and practicality of PMS-Net for real-time edge-deployed autonomous driving applications.