Semantic Nighttime Image Segmentation with Synthetic Stylized Data, Gradual Adaptation and Uncertainty-Aware Evaluation

This work addresses the problem of semantic segmentation of nighttime images. The main direction of recent progress in semantic segmentation pertains to daytime scenes with favorable illumination conditions. We focus on improving the performance of state-of-the-art methods on the nighttime domain by adapting them to nighttime data without extra annotations, and designing a new evaluation framework to address the uncertainty of semantics in nighttime images. To this end, we make the following contributions: 1) a novel pipeline for dataset-scale guided style transfer to generate synthetic nighttime images from real daytime input; 2) a framework to gradually adapt semantic segmentation models from day to night via stylized and real images of progressively increasing darkness; 3) a novel uncertainty-aware annotation and evaluation framework and metric for semantic segmentation in adverse conditions; 4) the Dark Zurich dataset with 2416 nighttime and 2920 twilight unlabeled images plus 20 nighttime images with pixel-level annotations that conform to our newly-proposed evaluation. Our experiments evidence that both our stylized data per se and our gradual adaptation significantly boost performance at nighttime both for standard evaluation metrics and our metric. Moreover, our new evaluation reveals that state-of-the-art segmentation models output overly confident predictions at indiscernible regions compared to visible ones.