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The encoder–decoder structure has been introduced into semantic segmentation to improve the spatial accuracy of the network by fusing high- and low-level feature maps. However, recent state-of-the-art encoder–decoder-based methods can hardly attain the real-time requirement due to their complex and inefficient decoders. To address this issue, in this paper, we propose a lightweight bilateral attention decoder for real-time semantic segmentation. It consists of two blocks and can fuse different level feature maps via two steps, i.e. , information refinement and information fusion. In the first step, we propose a channel attention branch to refine the high-level feature maps and a spatial attention branch for the low-level ones. The refined high-level feature maps can capture more exact semantic information and the refined low-level ones can capture more accurate spatial information, which significantly improves the information capturing ability of these feature maps. In the second step, we develop a new fusion module named pooling fusing block to fuse the refined high- and low-level feature maps. This fusion block can take full advantages of the high- and low-level feature maps, leading to high-quality fusion results. To verify the efficiency of the proposed bilateral attention decoder, we adopt a lightweight network as the backbone and compare our proposed method with other state-of-the-art real-time semantic segmentation methods on the Cityscapes and Camvid datasets. Experimental results demonstrate that our proposed method can achieve better performance with a higher inference speed. Moreover, we compare our proposed network with several state-of-the-art non-real-time semantic segmentation methods and find that our proposed network can also attain better segmentation performance. • We propose a refinement block to improve the information capturing ability of feature maps. • We develop a pooling fusion block to take full advantages of different level feature maps. • Combining two blocks, we propose a lightweight decoder for real-time semantic segmentation. • Our method can attain state-of-the-art accuracy and speed on Cityscapes and Camvid datasets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]