The proposed method in the study, called DEMMNet-KD, aims to address the challenges of scene parsing in RGB-D indoor scenes. The study recognizes the importance of lightweight models for pixel-intensive tasks like scene parsing, and proposes a depth enhancement mask mapping network (DEMMNet) with multi-teacher knowledge distillation approach to achieve both reduced model size and high accuracy. DEMMNet introduces a new segmentation paradigm called class-position separate segmentation to reduce the difficulty of delineating and classifying the segmentation region. It also includes a depth spatial enhancement module based on the attention mechanism to effectively utilize depth information in a single-stream network design. To improve performance without increasing complexity, DEMMNet-KD utilizes Mix Transformer encoder (MiT) as a backbone and employs multi-teacher knowledge distillation. This allows semantic knowledge to be transferred from large teacher networks with different performances to the student network. The experiments conducted on NYUDv2 and SUN RGB-D datasets demonstrate that DEMMNet-KD achieves state-of-the-art performance with fewer additional learnable parameters and minimal computational effort. Utilizing MiT-B2 as the backbone network, the DEMMNet-KD method attained mean Intersection over Union (mIoU) scores of 54.71% and 51.03% on the two datasets, respectively, thereby achieving an optimal balance between accuracy and efficiency. Furthermore, the scalability of this method has been demonstrated across various domains and modalities. Overall, the proposed DEMMNet-KD approach provides an efficient solution for scene parsing in RGB-D indoor scenes, enhancing the capabilities of bionic binocular robots in perceiving their environments and serving human society effectively. The code is available at https://github.com/SHARKALAKALA/DEMMNet.

Crowd density estimation has gained significant research interest owing to its potential in various industries and social applications. Therefore, this paper proposes a multistyle joint-perception network based on a knowledge distillation-trained student network (MJPNet-S*) for drone-based red–green–blue, thermal/depth (RGB-T/D) crowd density estimation tasks. To provide superior accuracy and efficiency, a novel trimodal working module effectively combines the modalities to facilitate comprehensive extraction and utilization. A two-step strategy comprising high-and low-level fusion is employed in which the high-level features capture relational reasoning and a one-dimensional projection relationship module captures multisensory field information with high-quality semantics. A shallow injection fusion module leverages the multiscale and channel relationships at the low level to combine full-text information interactively. Finally, to reduce resource consumption, a neighboring collaborative distillation method enables the lightweight student network to achieve superior performance by increasing the speed by 92 reducing the number of parameters by 83 of the teacher. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed MJPNet-S* performs remarkably well on two RGB-T datasets. The code will be made public at https://github.com/WBangG/MJPNet.

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.