Bridging the Day and Night Domain Gap for Semantic Segmentation

Perception in autonomous vehicles has progressed exponentially in the last years thanks to the advances of vision-based methods such as Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs). Current deep networks are both efficient and reliable, at least in standard conditions, standing as a suitable solution for the perception tasks of autonomous vehicles. However, there is a large accuracy downgrade when these methods are taken to adverse conditions such as nighttime. In this paper, we study methods to alleviate this accuracy gap by using recent techniques such as Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs). We explore diverse options such as enlarging the dataset to cover these domains in unsupervised training or adapting the images on-the-fly during inference to a comfortable domain such as sunny daylight in a pre-processing step. The results show some interesting insights and demonstrate that both proposed approaches considerably reduce the domain gap, allowing IV perception systems to work reliably also at night.