Yihong Cao

Yihong Cao, Hui Zhang, Xiao Lu et al.

Domain adaptive semantic segmentation enables robust pixel-wise understanding in real-world driving scenes. Source-free domain adaptation, as a more practical technique, addresses the concerns of data privacy and storage limitations in typical unsupervised domain adaptation methods, making it especially relevant in the context of intelligent vehicles. It utilizes a well-trained source model and unlabeled target data to achieve adaptation in the target domain. However, in the absence of source data and target labels, current solutions cannot sufficiently reduce the impact of domain shift and fully leverage the information from the target data. In this paper, we propose an end-to-end source-free domain adaptation semantic segmentation method via Importance-Aware and Prototype-Contrast (IAPC) learning. The proposed IAPC framework effectively extracts domain-invariant knowledge from the well-trained source model and learns domain-specific knowledge from the unlabeled target domain. Specifically, considering the problem of domain shift in the prediction of the target domain by the source model, we put forward an importance-aware mechanism for the biased target prediction probability distribution to extract domain-invariant knowledge from the source model. We further introduce a prototype-contrast strategy, which includes a prototype-symmetric cross-entropy loss and a prototype-enhanced cross-entropy loss, to learn target intra-domain knowledge without relying on labels. A comprehensive variety of experiments on two domain adaptive semantic segmentation benchmarks demonstrates that the proposed end-to-end IAPC solution outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods. The source code is publicly available at https://github.com/yihong-97/Source-free-IAPC.

Xiao Lu, Yihong Cao, Sheng Liu et al.

It is challenging to annotate large-scale datasets for supervised video shadow detection methods. Using a model trained on labeled images to the video frames directly may lead to high generalization error and temporal inconsistent results. In this paper, we address these challenges by proposing a Spatio-Temporal Interpolation Consistency Training (STICT) framework to rationally feed the unlabeled video frames together with the labeled images into an image shadow detection network training. Specifically, we propose the Spatial and Temporal ICT, in which we define two new interpolation schemes, \textit{i.e.}, the spatial interpolation and the temporal interpolation. We then derive the spatial and temporal interpolation consistency constraints accordingly for enhancing generalization in the pixel-wise classification task and for encouraging temporal consistent predictions, respectively. In addition, we design a Scale-Aware Network for multi-scale shadow knowledge learning in images, and propose a scale-consistency constraint to minimize the discrepancy among the predictions at different scales. Our proposed approach is extensively validated on the ViSha dataset and a self-annotated dataset. Experimental results show that, even without video labels, our approach is better than most state of the art supervised, semi-supervised or unsupervised image/video shadow detection methods and other methods in related tasks. Code and dataset are available at \url{https://github.com/yihong-97/STICT}.

Yihong Cao, Jiaming Zhang, Hao Shi et al.

Panoramic images can broaden the Field of View (FoV), occlusion-aware prediction can deepen the understanding of the scene, and domain adaptation can transfer across viewing domains. In this work, we introduce a novel task, Occlusion-Aware Seamless Segmentation (OASS), which simultaneously tackles all these three challenges. For benchmarking OASS, we establish a new human-annotated dataset for Blending Panoramic Amodal Seamless Segmentation, i.e., BlendPASS. Besides, we propose the first solution UnmaskFormer, aiming at unmasking the narrow FoV, occlusions, and domain gaps all at once. Specifically, UnmaskFormer includes the crucial designs of Unmasking Attention (UA) and Amodal-oriented Mix (AoMix). Our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on the BlendPASS dataset, reaching a remarkable mAPQ of 26.58% and mIoU of 43.66%. On public panoramic semantic segmentation datasets, i.e., SynPASS and DensePASS, our method outperforms previous methods and obtains 45.34% and 48.08% in mIoU, respectively. The fresh BlendPASS dataset and our source code are available at https://github.com/yihong-97/OASS.

Siyu Li, Fei Teng, Yihong Cao et al.

Birds' Eye View (BEV) semantic segmentation is an indispensable perception task in end-to-end autonomous driving systems. Unsupervised and semi-supervised learning for BEV tasks, as pivotal for real-world applications, underperform due to the homogeneous distribution of the labeled data. In this work, we explore the potential of synthetic data from driving world models to enhance the diversity of labeled data for robustifying BEV segmentation. Yet, our preliminary findings reveal that generation noise in synthetic data compromises efficient BEV model learning. To fully harness the potential of synthetic data from world models, this paper proposes NRSeg, a noise-resilient learning framework for BEV semantic segmentation. Specifically, a Perspective-Geometry Consistency Metric (PGCM) is proposed to quantitatively evaluate the guidance capability of generated data for model learning. This metric originates from the alignment measure between the perspective road mask of generated data and the mask projected from the BEV labels. Moreover, a Bi-Distribution Parallel Prediction (BiDPP) is designed to enhance the inherent robustness of the model, where the learning process is constrained through parallel prediction of multinomial and Dirichlet distributions. The former efficiently predicts semantic probabilities, whereas the latter adopts evidential deep learning to realize uncertainty quantification. Furthermore, a Hierarchical Local Semantic Exclusion (HLSE) module is designed to address the non-mutual exclusivity inherent in BEV semantic segmentation tasks. Experimental results demonstrate that NRSeg achieves state-of-the-art performance, yielding the highest improvements in mIoU of 13.8% and 11.4% in unsupervised and semi-supervised BEV segmentation tasks, respectively. The source code will be made publicly available at https://github.com/lynn-yu/NRSeg.

Mengfei Duan, Yuheng Zhang, Yihong Cao et al.

Panoramic imaging enables capturing 360° images with an ultra-wide Field-of-View (FoV) for dense omnidirectional perception, which is critical to applications, such as autonomous driving and augmented reality, etc. However, current panoramic semantic segmentation methods fail to identify outliers, and pinhole Out-of-distribution Segmentation (OoS) models perform unsatisfactorily in the panoramic domain due to background clutter and pixel distortions. To address these issues, we introduce a new task, Panoramic Out-of-distribution Segmentation (PanOoS), with the aim of achieving comprehensive and safe scene understanding. Furthermore, we propose the first solution, POS, which adapts to the characteristics of panoramic images through text-guided prompt distribution learning. Specifically, POS integrates a disentanglement strategy designed to materialize the cross-domain generalization capability of CLIP. The proposed Prompt-based Restoration Attention (PRA) optimizes semantic decoding by prompt guidance and self-adaptive correction, while Bilevel Prompt Distribution Learning (BPDL) refines the manifold of per-pixel mask embeddings via semantic prototype supervision. Besides, to compensate for the scarcity of PanOoS datasets, we establish two benchmarks: DenseOoS, which features diverse outliers in complex environments, and QuadOoS, captured by a quadruped robot with a panoramic annular lens system. Extensive experiments demonstrate superior performance of POS, with AuPRC improving by 34.25% and FPR95 decreasing by 21.42% on DenseOoS, outperforming state-of-the-art pinhole-OoS methods. Moreover, POS achieves leading closed-set segmentation capabilities and advances the development of panoramic understanding. Code and datasets will be available at https://github.com/MengfeiD/PanOoS.