Towards Adaptive Semantic Segmentation by Progressive Feature Refinement

As one of the fundamental tasks in computer vision, semantic segmentation plays an important role in real world applications. Although numerous deep learning models have made notable progress on several mainstream datasets with the rapid development of convolutional networks, they still encounter various challenges in practical scenarios. Unsupervised adaptive semantic segmentation aims to obtain a robust classifier trained with source domain data, which is able to maintain stable performance when deployed to a target domain with different data distribution. In this paper, we propose an innovative progressive feature refinement framework, along with domain adversarial learning to boost the transferability of segmentation networks. Specifically, we firstly align the multi-stage intermediate feature maps of source and target domain images, and then a domain classifier is adopted to discriminate the segmentation output. As a result, the segmentation models trained with source domain images can be transferred to a target domain without significant performance degradation. Experimental results verify the efficiency of our proposed method compared with state-of-the-art methods

Uncertainty-Aware Consistency Regularization for Cross-Domain Semantic Segmentation

Unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) aims to adapt existing models of the source domain to a new target domain with only unlabeled data. Many adversarial-based UDA methods involve high-instability training and have to carefully tune the optimization procedure. Some non-adversarial UDA methods employ a consistency regularization on the target predictions of a student model and a teacher model under different perturbations, where the teacher shares the same architecture with the student and is updated by the exponential moving average of the student. However, these methods suffer from noticeable negative transfer resulting from either the error-prone discriminator network or the unreasonable teacher model. In this paper, we propose an uncertainty-aware consistency regularization method for cross-domain semantic segmentation. By exploiting the latent uncertainty information of the target samples, more meaningful and reliable knowledge from the teacher model can be transferred to the student model. In addition, we further reveal the reason why the current consistency regularization is often unstable in minimizing the distribution discrepancy. We also show that our method can effectively ease this issue by mining the most reliable and meaningful samples with a dynamic weighting scheme of consistency loss. Experiments demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art methods on two domain adaptation benchmarks, $i.e.,$ GTAV $\rightarrow$ Cityscapes and SYNTHIA $\rightarrow$ Cityscapes

Unsupervised Domain Adaptation with Multiple Domain Discriminators and Adaptive Self-Training

Unsupervised Domain Adaptation (UDA) aims at improving the generalization capability of a model trained on a source domain to perform well on a target domain for which no labeled data is available. In this paper, we consider the semantic segmentation of urban scenes and we propose an approach to adapt a deep neural network trained on synthetic data to real scenes addressing the domain shift between the two different data distributions. We introduce a novel UDA framework where a standard supervised loss on labeled synthetic data is supported by an adversarial module and a self-training strategy aiming at aligning the two domain distributions. The adversarial module is driven by a couple of fully convolutional discriminators dealing with different domains: the first discriminates between ground truth and generated maps, while the second between segmentation maps coming from synthetic or real world data. The self-training module exploits the confidence estimated by the discriminators on unlabeled data to select the regions used to reinforce the learning process. Furthermore, the confidence is thresholded with an adaptive mechanism based on the per-class overall confidence. Experimental results prove the effectiveness of the proposed strategy in adapting a segmentation network trained on synthetic datasets like GTA5 and SYNTHIA, to real world datasets like Cityscapes and Mapillary.Comment: 8 pages, 3 figures, 2 table