LiteViLNet: Lightweight Vision-LiDAR Fusion Network for Efficient Road Segmentation

Road segmentation is a fundamental perception task for autonomous driving and mobile robotics, where both appearance and geometric cues must be processed under edge-computing constraints. Existing multi-modal approaches often improve accuracy with large encoders or expensive global interaction, which limits their use on embedded platforms. We present \textbf{LiteViLNet}, a lightweight RGB-geometry fusion network that combines a MobileNetV3 RGB encoder with a 0.12M-parameter depth-wise-separable geometry encoder. A multi-scale feature fusion module performs modality-specific enhancement, global-query cross-modal interaction, and adaptive gating, while a depth-wise large-kernel bridge enlarges the contextual support of the deepest representation with low overhead. The resulting U-Net-style decoder uses deep supervision only during training. On the KITTI Road benchmark, the 14.04M-parameter full model obtains $97.23\pm0.15\%$ MaxF. On the held-out ORFD test set under the released OFF-Net evaluation protocol, the full model achieves $96.74\pm0.09\%$ F-score and $93.68\pm0.18\%$ IoU. On a Jetson Orin NX, model-only PyTorch FP16 inference reaches $22.18\pm0.21$ FPS; a separate TensorRT FP16 measurement reaches $68.73\pm0.06$ FPS on the Jetson. Camera-depth adaptations and perception-and-control demonstrations on three heterogeneous robot platforms further illustrate the portability of the dual-stream design.