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DR-SCA: Directional Encoder Blocks and Semantic-Conditioned Coordinate Attention for UAV Semantic Segmentation

Year: 2026
Type: article
Abstract: Urban unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) scenes exhibit strong directional structure, and their foreground composition varies substantially across frames. Coordinate Attention encodes directional information through axis-wise pooling, but its gates are produced without an explicit feature-derived global conditioning path. Motivated by these properties, we propose DR-SCA, a compact RepVGG-style encoder–decoder combining Directional RepVGG (D-Rep) encoder blocks and bottleneck Semantic-Conditioned Coordinate Attention (SCA). In the encoder, D-Rep augments the RepVGG block with the horizontal and vertical asymmetric training branches of ACNet, which fold into one deployed 3×3 convolution. SCA applies feature-wise linear modulation (FiLM)-style feature-wise affine modulation to the Coordinate Attention descriptor using a global descriptor from the same bottleneck feature. The contribution lies in the architectural integration and controlled evaluation of encoder-side branch composition and bottleneck feature conditioning. Under a shared 50-epoch protocol with training from scratch over ten seeds, the compact base achieves 59.96% mean intersection over union (mIoU) on the UAVid validation split. Cross-ablation shows that D-Rep and SCA improve the compact base by 0.83 and 1.01 percentage points, respectively. Their combination yields a gain of 1.80 percentage points and a full-model mIoU of 61.75±0.30%. With 2.050M parameters, DR-SCA has the highest mean mIoU among the six from-scratch methods. It exceeds the second-ranked UNetFormer by 5.76 percentage points with 14.8% of its parameters. Baselines with ImageNet-pretrained encoders reduce this margin on the validation split and match or exceed DR-SCA on the official test split. No statistically significant accuracy difference is detected between D-Rep and either the Diverse Branch Block or an ACNet-style block, or between SCA and Coordinate Attention. Under the same controlled training budget, DR-SCA ranks first among the compared methods on UDD6 and LoveDA. Adding SCA to D-Rep without bottleneck attention improves mIoU on UDD6 but not on LoveDA. Dynamic online augmentation preserves the ranking of the three evaluated models on UAVid.
Source: Electronics
DOI: 10.3390/electronics15194396
Institution: Kyonggi University
Language: English
Open Access status: gold
Estimated APC paid: $2,896
OpenAlex ID: W7214213014
FWCI:
Cites: 26
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Related to: 10