DGPINet-KD: Deep Guided and Progressive Integration Network with Knowledge Distillation for RGB-D Indoor Scene Analysis

Significant advancements in RGB-D semantic segmentation have been made owing to the increasing availability of robust depth information. Most researchers have combined depth with RGB data to capture complementary information in images. Although this approach improves segmentation performance, it requires excessive model parameters. To address this problem, we propose DGPINet-KD, a deep-guided and progressive integration network with knowledge distillation (KD) for RGB-D indoor scene analysis. First, we used branching attention and depth guidance to capture coordinated, precise location information and extract more complete spatial information from the depth map to complement the semantic information for the encoded features. Second, we trained the student network (DGPINet-S) with a well-trained teacher network (DGPINet-T) using a multilevel KD. Third, an integration unit was developed to explore the contextual dependencies of the decoding features and to enhance relational KD. Comprehensive experiments on two challenging indoor benchmark datasets, NYUDv2 and SUN RGB-D, demonstrated that DGPINet-KD achieved improved performance in indoor scene analysis tasks compared with existing methods. Notably, on the NYUDv2 dataset, DGPINet-KD (DGPINet-S with KD) achieves a pixel accuracy gain of 1.7% and a class accuracy gain of 2.3% compared with DGPINet-S. In addition, compared with DGPINet-T, the proposed DGPINet-KD (DGPINet-S with KD) utilizes significantly fewer parameters (29.3M) while maintaining accuracy. The source code is available at https://github.com/XUEXIKUAIL/DGPINet.