Adversarial Domain Adaptation with a Domain Similarity Discriminator for Semantic Segmentation of Urban Areas

Existing semantic segmentation models of urban areas have shown to perform well in a supervised setting. However, collecting lots of annotated images from each city to train such models is time-consuming or difficult. In addition, when transferring the segmentation model from the trained city (source domain) to an unseen city (target domain), the performance will largely degrade due to the domain shift. For this reason, we propose a domain adaptation method with a domain similarity discriminator to eliminate such domain shift in the framework of adversarial learning. Contrary to the single-input adversarial network, our domain similarity discriminator, which consists of a Siamese network, is able to measure the similarity of the pairwise-input data. In this way, we can use more information about the pairwise-input to measure the similarity between different distributions so as to address the problem of domain shift. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach outperforms the competing methods on three different cities.