Although the Mask region-based convolutional neural network (R-CNN) model possessed a dominant position for complex and variable road scene segmentation, some problems still existed, including insufficient feature expressive ability and low segmentation accuracy. To address these problems, a novel road scene segmentation algorithm based on the modified Mask R-CNN was proposed. The multi-scale backbone network, Res2Net, was utilized to replace the ResNet network, and aimed to improve the feature extraction capability. The soft non-maximum suppression algorithm with attenuation function (soft-NMS) was adopted to improve detection efficiency in the case of a higher overlap rate. The comparison analyses of partition accuracy for various models were performed on the adopted Cityscapes dataset. The results demonstrated that the modified Mask R-CNN effectively increased the segmentation accuracy, especially for small and highly overlapping objects. The adopted Res2Net and soft-NMS can effectively enhance the feature extraction and improve segmentation performance. The average accuracy of the modified Mask R-CNN model reached up to 0.321, and was 0.054 higher than Mask R-CNN. This work provides important guidance to design a more efficient road scene instance segmentation algorithm for further promoting the actual application in automatic driving systems.

Under sample-size-limited conditions, the recognition accuracy of imperfect corn kernels is severely degraded. To address this issue, a recognition framework that integrates a Residual Generative Spatial–Channel Synergistic Attention Generative Adversarial Network (RGSGAN) with a Multi-Scale Asymmetric Convolutional Residual Network (MACRNet) was proposed. First, residual structures and a spatial–channel synergistic attention mechanism are incorporated into the RGSGAN generator, and the Wasserstein distance with gradient penalty is integrated to produce high-quality samples and expand the dataset. On this basis, the MACRNet employs a multi-branch asymmetric convolutional residual module to perform multi-scale feature fusion, thereby substantially enhancing its ability to capture subtle textural and local structural variations in imperfect corn kernels. The experimental results demonstrated that the proposed method attains a classification accuracy of 98.813%, surpassing ResNet18, EfficientNet-v2, ConvNeXt-T, and ConvNeXt-v2 by 8.3%, 6.16%, 3.01%, and 4.09%, respectively, and outperforms the model trained on the original dataset by 5.29%. These results confirm the superior performance of the proposed approach under sample-size-limited conditions, effectively alleviating the adverse impact of data scarcity on the recognition accuracy of imperfect corn kernels.