# Disentangle then Parse:Night-time Semantic Segmentation with Illumination Disentanglement

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.09362 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.09362/

## Key facts

- Cited by 12 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 41 of its 62 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 18 Jul 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 41)

- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [Swin Transformer: Hierarchical Vision Transformer using Shifted Windows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14030/) (2021)
- [Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.00667/) (2022)
- [Fully Convolutional Networks for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.4038/) (2014)
- [The Cityscapes Dataset for Semantic Urban Scene Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.01685/) (2016)
- [A ConvNet for the 2020s](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.03545/) (2022)
- [DeepLab: Semantic Image Segmentation with Deep Convolutional Nets, Atrous Convolution, and Fully Connected CRFs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.00915/) (2016)
- [Encoder-Decoder with Atrous Separable Convolution for Semantic Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.02611/) (2018)
- [Pyramid Scene Parsing Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.01105/) (2016)
- [Non-local Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.07971/) (2017)
- [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)
- [BDD100K: A Diverse Driving Dataset for Heterogeneous Multitask Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.04687/) (2018)
- [Multi-Scale Context Aggregation by Dilated Convolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.07122/) (2015)
- [Dual Attention Network for Scene Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.02983/) (2018)
- [Segmenter: Transformer for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.05633/) (2021)
- [Deep Retinex Decomposition for Low-Light Enhancement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.04560/) (2018)
- [Segmentation Transformer: Object-Contextual Representations for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.11065/) (2019)
- [Semantic Image Segmentation with Deep Convolutional Nets and Fully Connected CRFs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.7062/) (2014)
- [RefineNet: Multi-Path Refinement Networks for High-Resolution Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.06612/) (2016)
- [Domain Separation Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.06019/) (2016)
- [Unsupervised Pixel-Level Domain Adaptation with Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.05424/) (2016)
- [DRIT++: Diverse Image-to-Image Translation via Disentangled Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.01270/) (2019)
- [High-Resolution Representations for Labeling Pixels and Regions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.04514/) (2019)
- [OCNet: Object Context Network for Scene Parsing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.00916/) (2018)
- [Dark Model Adaptation: Semantic Image Segmentation from Daytime to Nighttime](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.02575/) (2018)
- [Disentangling factors of variation in deep representations using adversarial training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.03383/) (2016)
- [DANNet: A One-Stage Domain Adaptation Network for Unsupervised Nighttime Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.10834/) (2021)
- [Cars Can't Fly up in the Sky: Improving Urban-Scene Segmentation via Height-driven Attention Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.05128/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 12 of 12)

- [Stronger, Fewer, & Superior: Harnessing Vision Foundation Models for Domain Generalized Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.04265/) (2023)
- [SoMA: Singular Value Decomposed Minor Components Adaptation for Domain Generalizable Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.04077/) (2024)
- [CoDA: Instructive Chain-of-Domain Adaptation with Severity-Aware Visual Prompt Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.17369/) (2024)
- [G4Seg: Generation for Inexact Segmentation Refinement with Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.01539/) (2025)
- [PIG: Prompt Images Guidance for Night-Time Scene Parsing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.10531/) (2024)
- [RHRSegNet: Relighting High-Resolution Night-Time Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.06016/) (2024)
- [DreamSAC: Learning Hamiltonian World Models via Symmetry Exploration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.07545/) (2026)
- [Diffusion-Guided Knowledge Distillation for Weakly-Supervised Low-Light Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.07578/) (2025)
- [LiDAS: Lighting-driven Dynamic Active Sensing for Nighttime Perception](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.08912/) (2025)
- [Building Extraction from Remote Sensing Imagery under Hazy and Low-light Conditions: Benchmark and Baseline](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.15088/) (2026)
- [IAF-Net: Illumination-Adaptive Fusion for Low-Light Urban Road Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.30939/) (2026)
- [DIMOS: Disentangling Instance-level Moving Object Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.12826/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Most prior semantic segmentation methods have been developed for day-time scenes, while typically underperforming in night-time scenes due to insufficient and complicated lighting conditions. In this work, we tackle this challenge by proposing a novel night-time semantic segmentation paradigm, i.e., disentangle then parse (DTP). DTP explicitly disentangles night-time images into light-invariant reflectance and light-specific illumination components and then recognizes semantics based on their adaptive fusion. Concretely, the proposed DTP comprises two key components: 1) Instead of processing lighting-entangled features as in prior works, our Semantic-Oriented Disentanglement (SOD) framework enables the extraction of reflectance component without being impeded by lighting, allowing the network to consistently recognize the semantics under cover of varying and complicated lighting conditions. 2) Based on the observation that the illumination component can serve as a cue for some semantically confused regions, we further introduce an Illumination-Aware Parser (IAParser) to explicitly learn the correlation between semantics and lighting, and aggregate the illumination features to yield more precise predictions. Extensive experiments on the night-time segmentation task with various settings demonstrate that DTP significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods. Furthermore, with negligible additional parameters, DTP can be directly used to benefit existing day-time methods for night-time segmentation.