# Global and Local Texture Randomization for Synthetic-to-Real Semantic Segmentation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2108.02376 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.02376/

## Key facts

- Cited by 57 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 58 of its 84 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 5 Aug 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 58)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [PyTorch: An Imperative Style, High-Performance Deep Learning Library](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01703/) (2019)
- [Very Deep Convolutional Networks for Large-Scale Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.1556/) (2014)
- [Mask R-CNN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06870/) (2017)
- [Batch Normalization: Accelerating Deep Network Training by Reducing Internal Covariate Shift](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1502.03167/) (2015)
- [mixup: Beyond Empirical Risk Minimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.09412/) (2017)
- [Fully Convolutional Networks for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.4038/) (2014)
- [DeepLab: Semantic Image Segmentation with Deep Convolutional Nets, Atrous Convolution, and Fully Connected CRFs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.00915/) (2016)
- [CutMix: Regularization Strategy to Train Strong Classifiers with Localizable Features](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.04899/) (2019)
- [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)
- [Arbitrary Style Transfer in Real-time with Adaptive Instance Normalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06868/) (2017)
- [Unsupervised Domain Adaptation by Backpropagation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.7495/) (2014)
- [Improved Regularization of Convolutional Neural Networks with Cutout](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.04552/) (2017)
- [Domain Randomization for Transferring Deep Neural Networks from Simulation to the Real World](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06907/) (2017)
- [ImageNet-trained CNNs are biased towards texture; increasing shape bias improves accuracy and robustness](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.12231/) (2018)
- [Adversarial Discriminative Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.05464/) (2017)
- [Instance Normalization: The Missing Ingredient for Fast Stylization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.08022/) (2016)
- [Multi-Scale Context Aggregation by Dilated Convolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.07122/) (2015)
- [CyCADA: Cycle-Consistent Adversarial Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.03213/) (2017)
- [Deeper, Broader and Artier Domain Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.03077/) (2017)
- [Playing for Data: Ground Truth from Computer Games](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.02192/) (2016)
- [Learning to Generalize: Meta-Learning for Domain Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.03463/) (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)
- [Semantic Image Segmentation with Deep Convolutional Nets and Fully Connected CRFs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.7062/) (2014)
- [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)
- [Unsupervised Domain Adaptation with Residual Transfer Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1602.04433/) (2016)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 57)

- [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)
- [WildNet: Learning Domain Generalized Semantic Segmentation from the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.01446/) (2022)
- [DGInStyle: Domain-Generalizable Semantic Segmentation with Image Diffusion Models and Stylized Semantic Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.03048/) (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)
- [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)
- [Generalization by Adaptation: Diffusion-Based Domain Extension for Domain-Generalized Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.01850/) (2023)
- [Domain Adaptive and Generalizable Network Architectures and Training Strategies for Semantic Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.13615/) (2023)
- [Texture Learning Domain Randomization for Domain Generalized Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.11546/) (2023)
- [SoMA: Singular Value Decomposed Minor Components Adaptation for Domain Generalizable Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.04077/) (2024)
- [Style-Hallucinated Dual Consistency Learning: A Unified Framework for Visual Domain Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.09068/) (2022)
- [Learning Spectral-Decomposed Tokens for Domain Generalized Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.18568/) (2024)
- [Unsupervised Domain Adaptation via Domain-Adaptive Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.13893/) (2023)
- [Domain Generalization via Balancing Training Difficulty and Model Capability](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.00844/) (2023)
- [Strong but simple: A Baseline for Domain Generalized Dense Perception by CLIP-based Transfer Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.02021/) (2023)
- [Style Blind Domain Generalized Semantic Segmentation via Covariance Alignment and Semantic Consistence Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.06122/) (2024)
- [FisherTune: Fisher-Guided Robust Tuning of Vision Foundation Models for Domain Generalized Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.17940/) (2025)
- [Treasure in Distribution: A Domain Randomization based Multi-Source Domain Generalization for 2D Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.19949/) (2023)
- [Cross-Domain Few-Shot Semantic Segmentation via Doubly Matching Transformation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.15265/) (2024)
- [Generalized Semantic Segmentation by Self-Supervised Source Domain Projection and Multi-Level Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.01906/) (2023)
- [Augmentation-based Domain Generalization for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.12122/) (2023)
- [Exploring Semantic Consistency and Style Diversity for Domain Generalized Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.12050/) (2024)
- [Informative Data Mining for One-Shot Cross-Domain Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.14241/) (2023)
- [Stronger, Steadier & Superior: Geometric Consistency in Depth VFM Forges Domain Generalized Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.12753/) (2025)
- [IBAFormer: Intra-batch Attention Transformer for Domain Generalized Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.06282/) (2023)
- [DARNet: Bridging Domain Gaps in Cross-Domain Few-Shot Segmentation with Dynamic Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.04813/) (2023)
- [Diffusion Features to Bridge Domain Gap for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.00777/) (2024)
- [Adaptive Texture Filtering for Single-Domain Generalized Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.02943/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Semantic segmentation is a crucial image understanding task, where each pixel of image is categorized into a corresponding label. Since the pixel-wise labeling for ground-truth is tedious and labor intensive, in practical applications, many works exploit the synthetic images to train the model for real-word image semantic segmentation, i.e., Synthetic-to-Real Semantic Segmentation (SRSS). However, Deep Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) trained on the source synthetic data may not generalize well to the target real-world data. In this work, we propose two simple yet effective texture randomization mechanisms, Global Texture Randomization (GTR) and Local Texture Randomization (LTR), for Domain Generalization based SRSS. GTR is proposed to randomize the texture of source images into diverse unreal texture styles. It aims to alleviate the reliance of the network on texture while promoting the learning of the domain-invariant cues. In addition, we find the texture difference is not always occurred in entire image and may only appear in some local areas. Therefore, we further propose a LTR mechanism to generate diverse local regions for partially stylizing the source images. Finally, we implement a regularization of Consistency between GTR and LTR (CGL) aiming to harmonize the two proposed mechanisms during training. Extensive experiments on five publicly available datasets (i.e., GTA5, SYNTHIA, Cityscapes, BDDS and Mapillary) with various SRSS settings (i.e., GTA5/SYNTHIA to Cityscapes/BDDS/Mapillary) demonstrate that the proposed method is superior to the state-of-the-art methods for domain generalization based SRSS.