Source-Free Domain Adaptation for Semantic Segmentation
This addresses a practical issue for real-world applications where source data is private, enabling domain adaptation without data sharing.
The paper tackles the problem of adapting semantic segmentation models to new domains without access to the original source data, proposing a source-free domain adaptation framework that recovers source knowledge and uses target data for self-supervised learning, achieving competitive results on benchmark datasets.
Unsupervised Domain Adaptation (UDA) can tackle the challenge that convolutional neural network(CNN)-based approaches for semantic segmentation heavily rely on the pixel-level annotated data, which is labor-intensive. However, existing UDA approaches in this regard inevitably require the full access to source datasets to reduce the gap between the source and target domains during model adaptation, which are impractical in the real scenarios where the source datasets are private, and thus cannot be released along with the well-trained source models. To cope with this issue, we propose a source-free domain adaptation framework for semantic segmentation, namely SFDA, in which only a well-trained source model and an unlabeled target domain dataset are available for adaptation. SFDA not only enables to recover and preserve the source domain knowledge from the source model via knowledge transfer during model adaptation, but also distills valuable information from the target domain for self-supervised learning. The pixel- and patch-level optimization objectives tailored for semantic segmentation are seamlessly integrated in the framework. The extensive experimental results on numerous benchmark datasets highlight the effectiveness of our framework against the existing UDA approaches relying on source data.