Inaccurate freespace detection remains a significant challenge to the safety of autonomous driving. However, we observe that current multisource fusion approaches rely on converting LiDAR point clouds into depth maps, often lose crucial 3D geometric cues. This compromises the spatial consistency of predictions, especially in complex urban scenes. To address this limitation, we propose LiDAR-DHMT (LiDAR-Adaptive Dual-branch Hierarchical Mask Transformer), a novel framework designed for spatial-consistent freespace detection and semantic segmentation. Our key innovation lies in the introduction of a 3D Relative Position Bias module, which effectively captures LiDAR’s inherent spatial priors. This is coupled with a Dynamic Bias Attention mechanism that adaptively incorporates the 3D positional cues into the Transformer’s attention computation, enhancing spatial coherence. Additionally, we employ a Mask Interaction module and a global-local fusion strategy to jointly model contextual semantics and fine-grained structural details. Extensive experiments conducted on the KITTI Road, KITTI-360, Cityscapes datasets demonstrate that LiDAR-DHMT consistently outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods, achieving a competitive 97.59% F1 score in freespace detection and 69.45% and 84.4% mIoU in semantic segmentation. Our findings suggest that LiDAR-DHMT offers a practical solution for deploying robust freespace perception in complex urban driving environments.

RGB-D has gradually become a crucial data source for understanding complex scenes in assisted driving. However, existing studies have paid insufficient attention to the intrinsic spatial properties of depth maps. This oversight significantly impacts the attention representation, leading to prediction errors caused by attention shift issues. To this end, we propose a novel learnable Depth interaction Pyramid Transformer (DiPFormer) to explore the effectiveness of depth. Firstly, we introduce Depth Spatial-Aware Optimization (Depth SAO) as offset to represent real-world spatial relationships. Secondly, the similarity in the feature space of RGB-D is learned by Depth Linear Cross-Attention (Depth LCA) to clarify spatial differences at the pixel level. Finally, an MLP Decoder is utilized to effectively fuse multi-scale features for meeting real-time requirements. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed DiPFormer significantly addresses the issue of attention misalignment in both road detection (+7.5%) and semantic segmentation (+4.9% / +1.5%) tasks. DiPFormer achieves state-of-the-art performance on the KITTI (97.57% F-score on KITTI road and 68.74% mIoU on KITTI-360) and Cityscapes (83.4% mIoU) datasets.

Open-Vocabulary semantic segmentation (OVSS) and domain generalization in semantic segmentation (DGSS) highlight a subtle complementarity that motivates Open-Vocabulary Domain-Generalized Semantic Segmentation (OV-DGSS). OV-DGSS aims to generate pixel-level masks for unseen categories while maintaining robustness across unseen domains, a critical capability for real-world scenarios such as autonomous driving in adverse conditions. We introduce Vireo, a novel single-stage framework for OV-DGSS that unifies the strengths of OVSS and DGSS for the first time. Vireo builds upon the frozen Visual Foundation Models (VFMs) and incorporates scene geometry via Depth VFMs to extract domain-invariant structural features. To bridge the gap between visual and textual modalities under domain shift, we propose three key components: (1) GeoText Query, which align geometric features with language cues and progressively refine VFM encoder representations; (2) Coarse Mask Prior Embedding (CMPE) for enhancing gradient flow for faster convergence and stronger textual influence; and (3) the Domain-Open-Vocabulary Vector Embedding Head (DOV-VEH), which fuses refined structural and semantic features for robust prediction. Comprehensive evaluation on these components demonstrates the effectiveness of our designs. Our proposed Vireo achieves the state-of-the-art performance and surpasses existing methods by a large margin in both domain generalization and open-vocabulary recognition, offering a unified and scalable solution for robust visual understanding in diverse and dynamic environments. Code is available at https://github.com/SY-Ch/Vireo.

Semantic perception in driving scenarios plays a crucial role in intelligent transportation systems. However, existing Transformer-based semantic segmentation methods often do not fully exploit their potential in understanding driving scene dynamically. These methods typically lack spatial reasoning, failing to effectively correlate image pixels with their spatial positions, leading to attention drift. To address this issue, we propose a novel architecture, the Hierarchical Spatial Perception Transformer (HSPFormer), which integrates monocular depth estimation and semantic segmentation into a unified framework for the first time. We introduce the Spatial Depth Perception Auxiliary Network (SDPNet), a framework for multiscale feature extraction and multilayer depth map prediction to establish hierarchical spatial coherence. Additionally, we design the Hierarchical Pyramid Transformer Network (HPTNet), which uses depth estimation as learnable position embeddings to form spatially correlated semantic representations and generate global contextual information. Experiments on benchmark datasets such as KITTI-360, Cityscapes, and NYU Depth V2, demonstrate that HSPFormer outperforms several state-of-the-art networks, and achieves promising performance with 66.82% top-1 mIoU on KITTI-360, 83.8% mIoU on Cityscapes, and 57.7% mIoU on NYU Depth V2, respectively. The code will be made publicly available athttps://github.com/SY-Ch/HSPFormer.