Conditional Generative Adversarial Network for Structured Domain Adaptation

In recent years, deep neural nets have triumphed over many computer vision problems, including semantic segmentation, which is a critical task in emerging autonomous driving and medical image diagnostics applications. In general, training deep neural nets requires a humongous amount of labeled data, which is laborious and costly to collect and annotate. Recent advances in computer graphics shed light on utilizing photo-realistic synthetic data with computer generated annotations to train neural nets. Nevertheless, the domain mismatch between real images and synthetic ones is the major challenge against harnessing the generated data and labels. In this paper, we propose a principled way to conduct structured domain adaption for semantic segmentation, i.e., integrating GAN into the FCN framework to mitigate the gap between source and target domains. Specifically, we learn a conditional generator to transform features of synthetic images to real-image like features, and a discriminator to distinguish them. For each training batch, the conditional generator and the discriminator compete against each other so that the generator learns to produce real-image like features to fool the discriminator; afterwards, the FCN parameters are updated to accommodate the changes of GAN. In experiments, without using labels of real image data, our method significantly outperforms the baselines as well as state-of-the-art methods by 12% ~ 20% mean IoU on the Cityscapes dataset.