# Improving Semi-Supervised and Domain-Adaptive Semantic Segmentation with Self-Supervised Depth Estimation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2108.12545 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.12545/

## Key facts

- Cited by 25 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 79 of its 117 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 28 Aug 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 79)

- [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)
- [Momentum Contrast for Unsupervised Visual Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.05722/) (2019)
- [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)
- [Dropout as a Bayesian Approximation: Representing Model Uncertainty in Deep Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.02142/) (2015)
- [The Cityscapes Dataset for Semantic Urban Scene Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.01685/) (2016)
- [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)
- [FixMatch: Simplifying Semi-Supervised Learning with Consistency and Confidence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.07685/) (2020)
- [Unsupervised Representation Learning by Predicting Image Rotations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.07728/) (2018)
- [MixMatch: A Holistic Approach to Semi-Supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.02249/) (2019)
- [CyCADA: Cycle-Consistent Adversarial Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.03213/) (2017)
- [Unsupervised Visual Representation Learning by Context Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.05192/) (2015)
- [Unsupervised Monocular Depth Estimation with Left-Right Consistency](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.03677/) (2016)
- [Playing for Data: Ground Truth from Computer Games](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.02192/) (2016)
- [Unsupervised Learning of Depth and Ego-Motion from Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.07813/) (2017)
- [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)
- [FDA: Fourier Domain Adaptation for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.05498/) (2020)
- [End-to-End Multi-Task Learning with Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.10704/) (2018)
- [Semi-Supervised Semantic Segmentation with Cross Pseudo Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.01226/) (2021)
- [3D Packing for Self-Supervised Monocular Depth Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.02693/) (2019)
- [Semantic Foggy Scene Understanding with Synthetic Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.07819/) (2017)
- [Semi-Supervised Semantic Segmentation with Cross-Consistency Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.09005/) (2020)
- [Unsupervised CNN for Single View Depth Estimation: Geometry to the Rescue](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.04992/) (2016)
- [GeoNet: Unsupervised Learning of Dense Depth, Optical Flow and Camera Pose](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.02276/) (2018)
- [Variational Adversarial Active Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.00370/) (2019)
- [Prototypical Pseudo Label Denoising and Target Structure Learning for Domain Adaptive Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.10979/) (2021)
- [Interpolation Consistency Training for Semi-Supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.03825/) (2019)

## Built on by (most cited first, 25 of 25)

- [DAFormer: Improving Network Architectures and Training Strategies for Domain-Adaptive Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.14887/) (2021)
- [MIC: Masked Image Consistency for Context-Enhanced Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.01322/) (2022)
- [HRDA: Context-Aware High-Resolution Domain-Adaptive Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.13132/) (2022)
- [Learning Multiple Dense Prediction Tasks from Partially Annotated Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.14893/) (2021)
- [SemiVL: Semi-Supervised Semantic Segmentation with Vision-Language Guidance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.16241/) (2023)
- [Domain Adaptive and Generalizable Network Architectures and Training Strategies for Semantic Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.13615/) (2023)
- [ACT: Semi-supervised Domain-adaptive Medical Image Segmentation with Asymmetric Co-training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.02288/) (2022)
- [RadarCam-Depth: Radar-Camera Fusion for Depth Estimation with Learned Metric Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.04325/) (2024)
- [Style Blind Domain Generalized Semantic Segmentation via Covariance Alignment and Semantic Consistence Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.06122/) (2024)
- [EDAPS: Enhanced Domain-Adaptive Panoptic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.14291/) (2023)
- [Unsupervised Object Localization in the Era of Self-Supervised ViTs: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.12904/) (2023)
- [Training-Free Model Merging for Multi-target Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.13771/) (2024)
- [Distill Any Depth: Distillation Creates a Stronger Monocular Depth Estimator](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.19204/) (2025)
- [MICDrop: Masking Image and Depth Features via Complementary Dropout for Domain-Adaptive Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.16478/) (2024)
- [When Multi-Task Learning Meets Partial Supervision: A Computer Vision Review](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.14382/) (2023)
- [Radar-Guided Polynomial Fitting for Metric Depth Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.17182/) (2025)
- [Language-Guided Instance-Aware Domain-Adaptive Panoptic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.03799/) (2024)
- [SemiDAViL: Semi-supervised Domain Adaptation with Vision-Language Guidance for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.06389/) (2025)
- [Cross-Domain Semantic Segmentation on Inconsistent Taxonomy using VLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.02261/) (2024)
- [Layer-wise Model Merging for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation in Segmentation Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.15813/) (2024)
- [GeomPrompt: Geometric Prompt Learning for RGB-D Semantic Segmentation Under Missing and Degraded Depth](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.11585/) (2026)
- [On the Viability of Monocular Depth Pre-training for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.13987/) (2022)
- [Masked Representation Modeling for Domain-Adaptive Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.13801/) (2025)
- [DADO: A Depth-Attention framework for Object Discovery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.07089/) (2025)
- [WeatherSeg: Weather-Robust Image Segmentation using Teacher-Student Dual Learning and Classifier-Updating Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.22824/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Training deep networks for semantic segmentation requires large amounts of labeled training data, which presents a major challenge in practice, as labeling segmentation masks is a highly labor-intensive process. To address this issue, we present a framework for semi-supervised and domain-adaptive semantic segmentation, which is enhanced by self-supervised monocular depth estimation (SDE) trained only on unlabeled image sequences. In particular, we utilize SDE as an auxiliary task comprehensively across the entire learning framework: First, we automatically select the most useful samples to be annotated for semantic segmentation based on the correlation of sample diversity and difficulty between SDE and semantic segmentation. Second, we implement a strong data augmentation by mixing images and labels using the geometry of the scene. Third, we transfer knowledge from features learned during SDE to semantic segmentation by means of transfer and multi-task learning. And fourth, we exploit additional labeled synthetic data with Cross-Domain DepthMix and Matching Geometry Sampling to align synthetic and real data. We validate the proposed model on the Cityscapes dataset, where all four contributions demonstrate significant performance gains, and achieve state-of-the-art results for semi-supervised semantic segmentation as well as for semi-supervised domain adaptation. In particular, with only 1/30 of the Cityscapes labels, our method achieves 92% of the fully-supervised baseline performance and even 97% when exploiting additional data from GTA. The source code is available at https://github.com/lhoyer/improving_segmentation_with_selfsupervised_depth.