I2F: A Unified Image-to-Feature Approach for Domain Adaptive Semantic Segmentation

Unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) for semantic segmentation is a promising task freeing people from heavy annotation work. However, domain discrepancies in low-level image statistics and high-level contexts compromise the segmentation performance over the target domain. A key idea to tackle this problem is to perform both image-level and feature-level adaptation jointly. Unfortunately, there is a lack of such unified approaches for UDA tasks in the existing literature. This paper proposes a novel UDA pipeline for semantic segmentation that unifies image-level and feature-level adaptation. Concretely, for image-level domain shifts, we propose a global photometric alignment module and a global texture alignment module that align images in the source and target domains in terms of image-level properties. For feature-level domain shifts, we perform global manifold alignment by projecting pixel features from both domains onto the feature manifold of the source domain; and we further regularize category centers in the source domain through a category-oriented triplet loss and perform target domain consistency regularization over augmented target domain images. Experimental results demonstrate that our pipeline significantly outperforms previous methods. In the commonly tested GTA5rightarrowCityscapes task, our proposed method using Deeplab V3+ as the backbone surpasses previous SOTA by 8%, achieving 58.2% in mIoU.