MacDC: Masking-augmented Collaborative Domain Congregation for Multi-target Domain Adaptation in Semantic Segmentation

This paper addresses the challenges in multi-target domain adaptive (MTDA) for semantic segmentation, aiming to learn a single model capable of adapting to multi-target domains. Existing methods solely focus on visual appearance (style) discrepancies, overlooking contextual variations across multi-target domains, resulting in limited performance. We propose a novel approach termed Masking-augmented Collaborative Domain Congregation (MacDC) to handle both style gap and contextual gap among multi-target domains. MacDC achieves this goal by generating image-level and region-level intermediate domains among multi-target domains. To further strengthen contextual alignment, MacDC applies multi-context masking that enforces the model’s understanding of diverse contexts. Notably, MacDC directly learns a single model for multi-target domain adaptation, significantly reducing training times and model parameters. Despite its simplicity, MacDC demonstrates superior performance compared to state-of-the-art MTDA segmentation methods on the syn-to-real and real-to-real benchmarks.