Revisiting Downsampling in Semantic Segmentation: Fighting Aliasing with Dynamic Gaussian and Gabor Frequency Filters

Abstract Downsampling is essential in semantic segmentation for reducing computational cost and guiding the learning of class-discriminative features. Existing models typically rely on strided convolutions or patch splitting to obtain features with lower resolution. However, we observe that such operations often introduce edge jagging and texture degradation, the underlying cause is that aliasing of the high frequency induces phase distortion. We conducted a systematic analysis of phase distortion and identified two key properties: spatial non-uniformity (concentrated near boundaries) and directional sparsity (accumulated along a few dominant directions). These properties cause crucial high-frequency cues to be misrepresented or lost during sampling. To address this issue, we propose a frequency aware filter consisting of two complementary modules: a dynamic Gaussian kernel (DGK) and a learnable Gabor-based frequency selector (LFS). To mitigate spatial non-uniformity, the DGK predicts edge normals from gradients, applies strong low-pass filtering along the normal direction, and leaves the tangential direction virtually untouched, thereby suppressing phase distortion while preserving contour continuity. To handle directional sparsity, the Learnable Gabor Selector (LFS) then performs directional band-pass filtering to attenuate residual aliasing peaks and adaptively boost informative texture. We further introduce phase-error energy (PE) to quantify distortion severity. Visualization and quantitative results demonstrate that frequency-aware filter offers a plug-and-play remedy for aliasing, yielding sharper boundaries and consistent gains across datasets.