Cascaded hierarchical atrous spatial pyramid pooling module for semantic segmentation

•A new hierarchical structure consisting of multiple levels of atrous convolution layers.•A novel Cascaded Hierarchical Atrous Spatial Pyramid Pooling (CHASPP) network by cascading the hierarchical structures is constructed.•Global features and context information is extensively collected to form a more reasonable and accurate prediction.•The segmentation method outperforms the state of the arts.