# ROAD: Reality Oriented Adaptation for Semantic Segmentation of Urban Scenes

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1711.11556 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.11556/

## Key facts

- Cited by 95 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 30 Nov 2017.

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 95)

- [DAFormer: Improving Network Architectures and Training Strategies for Domain-Adaptive Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.14887/) (2021)
- [RobustNet: Improving Domain Generalization in Urban-Scene Segmentation via Instance Selective Whitening](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.15597/) (2021)
- [Source-Free Domain Adaptation for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.16372/) (2021)
- [FSDR: Frequency Space Domain Randomization for Domain Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.02370/) (2021)
- [Model Adaptation: Historical Contrastive Learning for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation without Source Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.03374/) (2021)
- [Self-supervised Augmentation Consistency for Adapting Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.00097/) (2021)
- [Unsupervised Domain Adaptation of Object Detectors: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.13502/) (2021)
- [Generalize then Adapt: Source-Free Domain Adaptive Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.11249/) (2021)
- [Domain Adaptive Semantic Segmentation with Self-Supervised Depth Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.13613/) (2021)
- [PixMatch: Unsupervised Domain Adaptation via Pixelwise Consistency Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.08128/) (2021)
- [Context-Aware Mixup for Domain Adaptive Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.03557/) (2021)
- [Semantic-Aware Domain Generalized Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.00822/) (2022)
- [LIGA-Stereo: Learning LiDAR Geometry Aware Representations for Stereo-based 3D Detector](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.08258/) (2021)
- [Category Contrast for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation in Visual Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.02885/) (2021)
- [Global and Local Texture Randomization for Synthetic-to-Real Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.02376/) (2021)
- [RDA: Robust Domain Adaptation via Fourier Adversarial Attacking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.02874/) (2021)
- [EvDistill: Asynchronous Events to End-task Learning via Bidirectional Reconstruction-guided Cross-modal Knowledge Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.12341/) (2021)
- [Multi-Target Domain Adaptation with Collaborative Consistency Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.03418/) (2021)
- [Cross-View Regularization for Domain Adaptive Panoptic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.02584/) (2021)
- [Deep Symmetric Adaptation Network for Cross-modality Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.06853/) (2021)
- [Semi-supervised Domain Adaptation based on Dual-level Domain Mixing for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.04705/) (2021)
- [Contrastive Syn-to-Real Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.02290/) (2021)
- [Learning to Relate Depth and Semantics for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.07830/) (2021)
- [BiMaL: Bijective Maximum Likelihood Approach to Domain Adaptation in Semantic Scene Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.03267/) (2021)
- [Domain Adaptation for Semantic Segmentation via Patch-Wise Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.11056/) (2021)
- [Survey on Unsupervised Domain Adaptation for Semantic Segmentation for Visual Perception in Automated Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.11928/) (2023)
- [SURDS: Benchmarking Spatial Understanding and Reasoning in Driving Scenarios with Vision Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.13112/) (2024)
- [Semantic Image Segmentation: Two Decades of Research](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.06378/) (2023)
- [FREDOM: Fairness Domain Adaptation Approach to Semantic Scene Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.02135/) (2023)
- [Diffusion-based Image Translation with Label Guidance for Domain Adaptive Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.12350/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Exploiting synthetic data to learn deep models has attracted increasing attention in recent years. However, the intrinsic domain difference between synthetic and real images usually causes a significant performance drop when applying the learned model to real world scenarios. This is mainly due to two reasons: 1) the model overfits to synthetic images, making the convolutional filters incompetent to extract informative representation for real images; 2) there is a distribution difference between synthetic and real data, which is also known as the domain adaptation problem. To this end, we propose a new reality oriented adaptation approach for urban scene semantic segmentation by learning from synthetic data. First, we propose a target guided distillation approach to learn the real image style, which is achieved by training the segmentation model to imitate a pretrained real style model using real images. Second, we further take advantage of the intrinsic spatial structure presented in urban scene images, and propose a spatial-aware adaptation scheme to effectively align the distribution of two domains. These two modules can be readily integrated with existing state-of-the-art semantic segmentation networks to improve their generalizability when adapting from synthetic to real urban scenes. We evaluate the proposed method on Cityscapes dataset by adapting from GTAV and SYNTHIA datasets, where the results demonstrate the effectiveness of our method.