This work addresses the problem of semantic scene understanding under dense fog. Although considerable progress has been made in semantic scene understanding, it is mainly related to clear-weather scenes. Extending recognition methods to adverse weather conditions such as fog is crucial for outdoor applications. In this paper, we propose a novel method, named Curriculum Model Adaptation (CMAda), which gradually adapts a semantic segmentation model from light synthetic fog to dense real fog in multiple steps, using both synthetic and real foggy data. In addition, we present three other main stand-alone contributions: 1) a novel method to add synthetic fog to real, clear-weather scenes using semantic input; 2) a new fog density estimator; 3) the Foggy Zurich dataset comprising @math real foggy images, with pixel-level semantic annotations for @math images with dense fog. Our experiments show that 1) our fog simulation slightly outperforms a state-of-the-art competing simulation with respect to the task of semantic foggy scene understanding (SFSU); 2) CMAda improves the performance of state-of-the-art models for SFSU significantly by leveraging unlabeled real foggy data. The datasets and code are publicly available.
Our work bears resemblance to transfer learning and model adaptation. Model adaptation across weather conditions to semantically segment simple road scenes is studied in @cite_33 . More recently, domain adversarial based approaches were proposed to adapt semantic segmentation models both at pixel level and feature level from simulated to real environments @cite_12 @cite_7 . Our work closes the domain gap by generating synthetic fog and by using the policy of adaptation. Combining our method and the aforementioned transfer learning methods is a promising direction. The concurrent work in @cite_53 on adaptation of semantic models from daytime to nighttime solely with real data is closely related to ours.
@cite_7 @cite_53 @cite_33 @cite_12
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Domain adaptation is critical for success in new, unseen environments. Adversarial adaptation models applied in feature spaces discover domain invariant representations, but are difficult to visualize and sometimes fail to capture pixel-level and low-level domain shifts. Recent work has shown that generative adversarial networks combined with cycle-consistency constraints are surprisingly effective at mapping images between domains, even without the use of aligned image pairs. We propose a novel discriminatively-trained Cycle-Consistent Adversarial Domain Adaptation model. CyCADA adapts representations at both the pixel-level and feature-level, enforces cycle-consistency while leveraging a task loss, and does not require aligned pairs. Our model can be applied in a variety of visual recognition and prediction settings. We show new state-of-the-art results across multiple adaptation tasks, including digit classification and semantic segmentation of road scenes demonstrating transfer from synthetic to real world domains. Semantic road labeling is a key component of systems that aim at assisted or even autonomous driving. Considering that such systems continuously operate in the real-world, unforeseen conditions not represented in any conceivable training procedure are likely to occur on a regular basis. In order to equip systems with the ability to cope with such situations, we would like to enable adaptation to such new situations and conditions at runtime. Existing adaptive methods for image labeling either require labeled data from the new condition or even operate globally on a complete test set. None of this is a desirable mode of operation for a system as described above where new images arrive sequentially and conditions may vary. We study the effect of changing test conditions on scene labeling methods based on a new diverse street scene dataset. We propose a novel approach that can operate in such conditions and is based on a sequential Bayesian model update in order to robustly integrate the arriving images into the adapting procedure. Visual Domain Adaptation is a problem of immense importance in computer vision. Previous approaches showcase the inability of even deep neural networks to learn informative representations across domain shift. This problem is more severe for tasks where acquiring hand labeled data is extremely hard and tedious. In this work, we focus on adapting the representations learned by segmentation networks across synthetic and real domains. Contrary to previous approaches that use a simple adversarial objective or superpixel information to aid the process, we propose an approach based on Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) that brings the embeddings closer in the learned feature space. To showcase the generality and scalability of our approach, we show that we can achieve state of the art results on two challenging scenarios of synthetic to real domain adaptation. Additional exploratory experiments show that our approach: (1) generalizes to unseen domains and (2) results in improved alignment of source and target distributions.