# RobustNet: Improving Domain Generalization in Urban-Scene Segmentation via Instance Selective Whitening

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2103.15597 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.15597/

## Key facts

- Cited by 215 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 56 of its 70 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 29 Mar 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 56)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [Batch Normalization: Accelerating Deep Network Training by Reducing Internal Covariate Shift](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1502.03167/) (2015)
- [Fully Convolutional Networks for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.4038/) (2014)
- [MobileNetV2: Inverted Residuals and Linear Bottlenecks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.04381/) (2018)
- [The Cityscapes Dataset for Semantic Urban Scene Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.01685/) (2016)
- [Encoder-Decoder with Atrous Separable Convolution for Semantic Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.02611/) (2018)
- [Domain-Adversarial Training of Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.07818/) (2015)
- [Pyramid Scene Parsing Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.01105/) (2016)
- [Rethinking Atrous Convolution for Semantic Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.05587/) (2017)
- [Unsupervised Domain Adaptation by Backpropagation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.7495/) (2014)
- [SegNet: A Deep Convolutional Encoder-Decoder Architecture for Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.00561/) (2015)
- [BDD100K: A Diverse Driving Dataset for Heterogeneous Multitask Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.04687/) (2018)
- [Deep CORAL: Correlation Alignment for Deep Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.01719/) (2016)
- [Instance Normalization: The Missing Ingredient for Fast Stylization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.08022/) (2016)
- [ShuffleNet V2: Practical Guidelines for Efficient CNN Architecture Design](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.11164/) (2018)
- [CyCADA: Cycle-Consistent Adversarial Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.03213/) (2017)
- [Playing for Data: Ground Truth from Computer Games](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.02192/) (2016)
- [Multimodal Unsupervised Image-to-Image Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.04732/) (2018)
- [Learning to Generalize: Meta-Learning for Domain Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.03463/) (2017)
- [Maximum Classifier Discrepancy for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.02560/) (2017)
- [Domain Generalization via Invariant Feature Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1301.2115/) (2013)
- [ADVENT: Adversarial Entropy Minimization for Domain Adaptation in Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.12833/) (2018)
- [Learning to Adapt Structured Output Space for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.10349/) (2018)
- [Domain Generalization via Model-Agnostic Learning of Semantic Features](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.13580/) (2019)
- [Two at Once: Enhancing Learning and Generalization Capacities via IBN-Net](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.09441/) (2018)
- [Universal Style Transfer via Feature Transforms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.08086/) (2017)
- [Unified Deep Supervised Domain Adaptation and Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.10190/) (2017)
- [Diverse Image-to-Image Translation via Disentangled Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.00948/) (2018)
- [Learning to Generate Novel Domains for Domain Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.03304/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 215)

- [Uncertainty Modeling for Out-of-Distribution Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.03958/) (2022)
- [Transformer-Based Visual Segmentation: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.09854/) (2023)
- [EcoTTA: Memory-Efficient Continual Test-time Adaptation via Self-distilled Regularization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.01904/) (2023)
- [TTN: A Domain-Shift Aware Batch Normalization in Test-Time Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.05155/) (2023)
- [Style-Hallucinated Dual Consistency Learning for Domain Generalized Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.02548/) (2022)
- [CLIP the Gap: A Single Domain Generalization Approach for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.05499/) (2023)
- [Stronger, Fewer, & Superior: Harnessing Vision Foundation Models for Domain Generalized Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.04265/) (2023)
- [Semantic-Aware Domain Generalized Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.00822/) (2022)
- [Standardized Max Logits: A Simple yet Effective Approach for Identifying Unexpected Road Obstacles in Urban-Scene Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.11264/) (2021)
- [WildNet: Learning Domain Generalized Semantic Segmentation from the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.01446/) (2022)
- [Adversarial Style Augmentation for Domain Generalized Urban-Scene Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.04892/) (2022)
- [Improving Test-Time Adaptation via Shift-agnostic Weight Regularization and Nearest Source Prototypes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.11707/) (2022)
- [Test-time Batch Statistics Calibration for Covariate Shift](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.04065/) (2021)
- [Pin the Memory: Learning to Generalize Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.03609/) (2022)
- [Revisiting Domain Generalized Stereo Matching Networks from a Feature Consistency Perspective](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.10887/) (2022)
- [DGInStyle: Domain-Generalizable Semantic Segmentation with Image Diffusion Models and Stylized Semantic Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.03048/) (2023)
- [Source-Free Open Compound Domain Adaptation in Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.03422/) (2021)
- [Instance-Aware Domain Generalization for Face Anti-Spoofing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.05640/) (2023)
- [Feature Stylization and Domain-aware Contrastive Learning for Domain Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.08596/) (2021)
- [ITSA: An Information-Theoretic Approach to Automatic Shortcut Avoidance and Domain Generalization in Stereo Matching Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.02263/) (2022)
- [PASTA: Proportional Amplitude Spectrum Training Augmentation for Syn-to-Real Domain Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.00979/) (2022)
- [Towards Open-Set Test-Time Adaptation Utilizing the Wisdom of Crowds in Entropy Minimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.06879/) (2023)
- [Progressive Random Convolutions for Single Domain Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.00424/) (2023)
- [Collaborating Foundation Models for Domain Generalized Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.09788/) (2023)
- [HGFormer: Hierarchical Grouping Transformer for Domain Generalized Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.13031/) (2023)
- [FIFO: Learning Fog-invariant Features for Foggy Scene Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.01587/) (2022)
- [Learning Content-enhanced Mask Transformer for Domain Generalized Urban-Scene Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.00371/) (2023)
- [Prompting Diffusion Representations for Cross-Domain Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.02138/) (2023)
- [Survey on Unsupervised Domain Adaptation for Semantic Segmentation for Visual Perception in Automated Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.11928/) (2023)
- [Improving Single Domain-Generalized Object Detection: A Focus on Diversification and Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.14497/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Enhancing the generalization capability of deep neural networks to unseen domains is crucial for safety-critical applications in the real world such as autonomous driving. To address this issue, this paper proposes a novel instance selective whitening loss to improve the robustness of the segmentation networks for unseen domains. Our approach disentangles the domain-specific style and domain-invariant content encoded in higher-order statistics (i.e., feature covariance) of the feature representations and selectively removes only the style information causing domain shift. As shown in Fig. 1, our method provides reasonable predictions for (a) low-illuminated, (b) rainy, and (c) unseen structures. These types of images are not included in the training dataset, where the baseline shows a significant performance drop, contrary to ours. Being simple yet effective, our approach improves the robustness of various backbone networks without additional computational cost. We conduct extensive experiments in urban-scene segmentation and show the superiority of our approach to existing work. Our code is available at https://github.com/shachoi/RobustNet.