# Unsupervised Monocular Road Segmentation for Autonomous Driving via Scene Geometry

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.16790 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.16790/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 29 of its 38 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 19 Oct 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 29 of 29)

- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [Emerging Properties in Self-Supervised Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.14294/) (2021)
- [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)
- [DeepLab: Semantic Image Segmentation with Deep Convolutional Nets, Atrous Convolution, and Fully Connected CRFs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.00915/) (2016)
- [Searching for MobileNetV3](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.02244/) (2019)
- [Invariant Information Clustering for Unsupervised Image Classification and Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.06653/) (2018)
- [Unsupervised Semantic Segmentation by Distilling Feature Correspondences](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.08414/) (2022)
- [Unsupervised Semantic Segmentation by Contrasting Object Mask Proposals](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.06191/) (2021)
- [Self-Supervised Transformers for Unsupervised Object Discovery using Normalized Cut](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.11539/) (2022)
- [Deep Spectral Methods: A Surprisingly Strong Baseline for Unsupervised Semantic Segmentation and Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.07839/) (2022)
- [Autoregressive Unsupervised Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.08247/) (2020)
- [ACSeg: Adaptive Conceptualization for Unsupervised Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.05944/) (2022)
- [Leveraging Hidden Positives for Unsupervised Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.15014/) (2023)
- [TransFGU: A Top-down Approach to Fine-Grained Unsupervised Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.01515/) (2021)
- [Hierarchical Feature Alignment Network for Unsupervised Video Object Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.08485/) (2022)
- [Unsupervised Video Object Segmentation via Prototype Memory Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.03712/) (2022)
- [DeepCut: Unsupervised Segmentation using Graph Neural Networks Clustering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.05853/) (2022)
- [Drive&Segment: Unsupervised Semantic Segmentation of Urban Scenes via Cross-modal Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.11160/) (2022)
- [Unsupervised Semantic Segmentation Through Depth-Guided Feature Correlation and Sampling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.12378/) (2023)
- [InfoSeg: Unsupervised Semantic Image Segmentation with Mutual Information Maximization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.03477/) (2021)
- [Deep Superpixel Cut for Unsupervised Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.06031/) (2021)
- [Weakly Supervised Semantic Segmentation for Driving Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.13646/) (2023)
- [Learning Motion and Temporal Cues for Unsupervised Video Object Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.07806/) (2025)
- [Distantly Supervised Road Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.06118/) (2017)
- [Minimizing Supervision for Free-space Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.05998/) (2017)
- [FODVid: Flow-guided Object Discovery in Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.04392/) (2023)
- [Expand-and-Quantize: Unsupervised Semantic Segmentation Using High-Dimensional Space and Product Quantization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.07342/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

This paper presents a fully unsupervised approach for binary road segmentation (road vs. non-road), eliminating the reliance on costly manually labeled datasets. The method leverages scene geometry and temporal cues to distinguish road from non-road regions. Weak labels are first generated from geometric priors, marking pixels above the horizon as non-road and a predefined quadrilateral in front of the vehicle as road. In a refinement stage, temporal consistency is enforced by tracking local feature points across frames and penalizing inconsistent label assignments using mutual information maximization. This enhances both precision and temporal stability. On the Cityscapes dataset, the model achieves an Intersection-over-Union (IoU) of 0.86, outperforming the competing unsupervised methods. These findings demonstrate the potential of combining geometric constraints and temporal consistency for scalable unsupervised road segmentation in autonomous driving.