Domain-Incremental Semantic Segmentation for Autonomous Driving under Adverse Driving Conditions
This addresses the challenge of maintaining performance across varying weather and illumination conditions for autonomous driving systems, representing an incremental improvement over existing domain adaptation methods.
The paper tackles the problem of semantic segmentation for autonomous driving under adverse conditions, where standard models degrade and fine-tuning causes forgetting; the proposed Progressive Semantic Segmentation (PSS) approach dynamically grows domain-specific models, showing generalization to similar and unseen domains.
Semantic segmentation for autonomous driving is an even more challenging task when faced with adverse driving conditions. Standard models trained on data recorded under ideal conditions show a deteriorated performance in unfavorable weather or illumination conditions. Fine-tuning on the new task or condition would lead to overwriting the previously learned information resulting in catastrophic forgetting. Adapting to the new conditions through traditional domain adaption methods improves the performance on the target domain at the expense of the source domain. Addressing these issues, we propose an architecture-based domain-incremental learning approach called Progressive Semantic Segmentation (PSS). PSS is a task-agnostic, dynamically growing collection of domain-specific segmentation models. The task of inferring the domain and subsequently selecting the appropriate module for segmentation is carried out using a collection of convolutional autoencoders. We extensively evaluate our proposed approach using several datasets at varying levels of granularity in the categorization of adverse driving conditions. Furthermore, we demonstrate the generalization of the proposed approach to similar and unseen domains.