Efficient compression of encoder-decoder models for semantic segmentation using the separation index
Movahed Jamshidi, Ahmad Kalhor, Abdol‐Hossein Vahabie · Scientific Reports · 2025
We present a novel approach to compressing encoder-decoder architectures, particularly in semantic segmentation tasks, by leveraging the Separation Index (SI)-a metric that quantifies how distinctly a network's feature maps separate different classes at the pixel level. By identifying and pruning redundant layers and filters, our method preserves the fine-grained spatial details crucial for segmentation while significantly reducing model complexity. We evaluated our approach on five diverse datasets-CamVid (road scenes), KiTS19 (kidney tumor CT scans), the 2018 Data Science Bowl (nuclei segmentation), Aerial Imagery for remote sensing, and MVTec AD (industrial anomaly detection)-across architectures such as U-Net, LinkNet, MobileNet, DeepLabV3, and SegNet. Experimental results show that SI-driven compression reduces parameters and floating-point operations by up to 70% while maintaining or even improving segmentation accuracy, as measured by mean Intersection over Union (IoU). For example, a compressed DeepLabV3 raises the mean IoU from 0.624 to 0.638 on an aerial imagery dataset with a 2.6× reduction in parameters and faster inference. These findings highlight how SI-based pruning balances efficiency and performance, offering a practical solution for resource-constrained semantic segmentation applications.