Munich to Dubai: How far is it for Semantic Segmentation?

Shyam Nandan Rai, Vineeth N Balasubramanian, Anbumani Subramanian, C.V. Jawahar; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Winter Conference on Applications of Computer Vision (WACV), 2020, pp. 2999-3008

Cities having hot weather conditions results in geometrical distortion, thereby adversely affecting the performance of semantic segmentation model. In this work, we study the problem of semantic segmentation model in adapting to such hot climate cities. This issue can be circumvented by collecting and annotating images in such weather conditions and training segmentation models on those images. But the task of semantically annotating images for every environment is painstaking and expensive. Hence, we propose a framework that improves the performance of semantic segmentation models without explicitly creating an annotated dataset for such adverse weather variations. Our framework consists of two parts, a restoration network to remove the geometrical distortions caused by hot weather and an adaptive segmentation network that is trained on an additional loss to adapt to the statistics of the ground-truth segmentation map. We train our framework on the Cityscapes dataset, which showed a total IoU gain of 12.707 over standard segmentation models. We also observe that the segmentation results obtained by our framework gave a significant improvement for small classes such as poles, person, and rider, which are essential and valuable for autonomous navigation based applications.