This work addresses the problem of semantic image segmentation of nighttime
scenes. Although considerable progress has been made in semantic image
segmentation, it is mainly related to daytime scenarios. This paper proposes a
novel method to progressive adapt the semantic models trained on daytime
scenes, along with large-scale annotations therein, to nighttime scenes via the
bridge of twilight time -- the time between dawn and sunrise, or between sunset
and dusk. The goal of the method is to alleviate the cost of human annotation
for nighttime images by transferring knowledge from standard daytime
conditions. In addition to the method, a new dataset of road scenes is
compiled; it consists of 35,000 images ranging from daytime to twilight time
and to nighttime. Also, a subset of the nighttime images are densely annotated
for method evaluation. Our experiments show that our method is effective for
model adaptation from daytime scenes to nighttime scenes, without using extra
human annotation.Comment: Accepted to International Conference on Intelligent Transportation
Systems (ITSC 2018
