A Domain Agnostic Normalization Layer for Unsupervised Adversarial Domain Adaptation

We propose a normalization layer for unsupervised domain adaption in semantic scene segmentation. Normalization layers are known to improve convergence and generalization and are part of many state-of-the-art fully-convolutional neural networks. We show that conventional normalization layers worsen the performance of current Unsupervised Adversarial Domain Adaption (UADA), which is a method to improve network performance on unlabeled datasets and the focus of our research. Therefore, we propose a novel Domain Agnostic Normalization layer and thereby unlock the benefits of normalization layers for unsupervised adversarial domain adaptation. In our evaluation, we adapt from the synthetic GTA5 data set to the real Cityscapes data set, a common benchmark experiment, and surpass the state-of-the-art. As our normalization layer is domain agnostic at test time, we furthermore demonstrate that UADA using Domain Agnostic Normalization improves performance on unseen domains, specifically on Apolloscape and Mapillary

Robust Place Categorization With Deep Domain Generalization

Traditional place categorization approaches in robot vision assume that training and test images have similar visual appearance. Therefore, any seasonal, illumination, and environmental changes typically lead to severe degradation in performance. To cope with this problem, recent works have been proposed to adopt domain adaptation techniques. While effective, these methods assume that some prior information about the scenario where the robot will operate is available at training time. Unfortunately, in many cases, this assumption does not hold, as we often do not know where a robot will be deployed. To overcome this issue, in this paper, we present an approach that aims at learning classification models able to generalize to unseen scenarios. Specifically, we propose a novel deep learning framework for domain generalization. Our method develops from the intuition that, given a set of different classification models associated to known domains (e.g., corresponding to multiple environments, robots), the best model for a new sample in the novel domain can be computed directly at test time by optimally combining the known models. To implement our idea, we exploit recent advances in deep domain adaptation and design a convolutional neural network architecture with novel layers performing a weighted version of batch normalization. Our experiments, conducted on three common datasets for robot place categorization, confirm the validity of our contribution

Domain Generalization in Vision: A Survey

Generalization to out-of-distribution (OOD) data is a capability natural to humans yet challenging for machines to reproduce. This is because most learning algorithms strongly rely on the i.i.d.~assumption on source/target data, which is often violated in practice due to domain shift. Domain generalization (DG) aims to achieve OOD generalization by using only source data for model learning. Since first introduced in 2011, research in DG has made great progresses. In particular, intensive research in this topic has led to a broad spectrum of methodologies, e.g., those based on domain alignment, meta-learning, data augmentation, or ensemble learning, just to name a few; and has covered various vision applications such as object recognition, segmentation, action recognition, and person re-identification. In this paper, for the first time a comprehensive literature review is provided to summarize the developments in DG for computer vision over the past decade. Specifically, we first cover the background by formally defining DG and relating it to other research fields like domain adaptation and transfer learning. Second, we conduct a thorough review into existing methods and present a categorization based on their methodologies and motivations. Finally, we conclude this survey with insights and discussions on future research directions.Comment: v4: includes the word "vision" in the title; improves the organization and clarity in Section 2-3; adds future directions; and mor