# Texture-Shape Bias Balancing for Robust Synthetic-to-Real Semantic Segmentation in Automotive NIR Imagery

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.15072 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.15072/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 35 of its 63 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 13 Jun 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 35)

- [High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10752/) (2021)
- [Very Deep Convolutional Networks for Large-Scale Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.1556/) (2014)
- [LoRA: Low-Rank Adaptation of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.09685/) (2021)
- [Adding Conditional Control to Text-to-Image Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.05543/) (2023)
- [The Cityscapes Dataset for Semantic Urban Scene Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.01685/) (2016)
- [SDXL: Improving Latent Diffusion Models for High-Resolution Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.01952/) (2023)
- [Gemini 2.5: Pushing the Frontier with Advanced Reasoning, Multimodality, Long Context, and Next Generation Agentic Capabilities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.06261/) (2025)
- [Encoder-Decoder with Atrous Separable Convolution for Semantic Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.02611/) (2018)
- [SegFormer: Simple and Efficient Design for Semantic Segmentation with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.15203/) (2021)
- [Benchmarking Neural Network Robustness to Common Corruptions and Perturbations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.12261/) (2019)
- [Masked-attention Mask Transformer for Universal Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.01527/) (2021)
- [Arbitrary Style Transfer in Real-time with Adaptive Instance Normalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06868/) (2017)
- [Shortcut Learning in Deep Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.07780/) (2020)
- [Vision Transformers for Dense Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.13413/) (2021)
- [ImageNet-trained CNNs are biased towards texture; increasing shape bias improves accuracy and robustness](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.12231/) (2018)
- [Playing for Data: Ground Truth from Computer Games](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.02192/) (2016)
- [FDA: Fourier Domain Adaptation for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.05498/) (2020)
- [Intriguing Properties of Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.10497/) (2021)
- [Uni-ControlNet: All-in-One Control to Text-to-Image Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.16322/) (2023)
- [MIC: Masked Image Consistency for Context-Enhanced Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.01322/) (2022)
- [Diffusion-based Image Translation using Disentangled Style and Content Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.15264/) (2022)
- [Estimating and Exploiting the Aleatoric Uncertainty in Surface Normal Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.09881/) (2021)
- [Style-Hallucinated Dual Consistency Learning for Domain Generalized Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.02548/) (2022)
- [DGInStyle: Domain-Generalizable Semantic Segmentation with Image Diffusion Models and Stylized Semantic Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.03048/) (2023)
- [SVIRO: Synthetic Vehicle Interior Rear Seat Occupancy Dataset and Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.03483/) (2020)
- [One-Shot Structure-Aware Stylized Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.17275/) (2024)
- [ImageNet-trained CNNs are not biased towards texture: Revisiting feature reliance through controlled suppression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.20234/) (2025)
- [IDD-AW: A Benchmark for Safe and Robust Segmentation of Drive Scenes in Unstructured Traffic and Adverse Weather](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.14459/) (2023)
- [Reducing Texture Bias of Deep Neural Networks via Edge Enhancing Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.09530/) (2024)
- [TICaM: A Time-of-flight In-car Cabin Monitoring Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.11719/) (2021)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Semantic segmentation is a fundamental component of visual perception in modern automotive systems, enabling pixel-level scene understanding. Near-Infrared imaging (NIR) offers stable detection under difficult illumination conditions, but the development of domain-specific semantic segmentation models remains challenging due to the lack of high-quality annotated data from real-world scenarios. Synthetic datasets offer a scalable alternative, but models trained on synthetic images often suffer performance degradation when transferred to real domains. We present the first systematic study on synthetic to real domain adaptation for semantic segmentation in NIR images in the automotive domain. We propose a generative augmentation framework that transforms synthetic images into realistic NIR-style variants via our introduced target style adaptation (TSA). TSA fine-tunes a latent diffusion model via low-rank adaptation on a small curated set of real NIR images and applies it to synthetic training data using structure-preserving multi-signal conditioning. To reduce texture bias and improve segmentation robustness, we further apply a Voronoi-based style diversification strategy (VSD) that modifies the original textures while preserving scene geometry. Experiments with multiple model architectures on NIR data from vehicle interiors and street scenes show that balancing inductive bias during training leads to noticeably more robust semantic segmentation and effectively reduces the domain gap in our real-world scenarios by up to 63.6% on exterior and 28.4% on interior data. The code is available at GitHub.