Unified Domain Adaptive Semantic Segmentation

Unsupervised Domain Adaptive Semantic Segmentation (UDA-SS) aims to transfer the supervision from a labeled source domain to an unlabeled and shifted target domain. The majority of existing UDA-SS works typically consider images whilst recent attempts have extended further to tackle videos by modeling the temporal dimension. Although two lines of research share the major challenges – overcoming the underlying domain distribution shift, their studies are largely independent. It causes several issues: (1) The insights gained from each line of research remain fragmented, leading to a lack of holistic understanding of the problem and potential solutions. (2) Preventing the unification of methods and best practices across two scenarios (images and videos) will lead to redundant efforts and missed opportunities for cross-pollination of ideas. (3) Without a unified approach, the knowledge and advancements made in one scenario may not be effectively transferred to the other, leading to suboptimal performance and slower progress. Under this observation, we advocate unifying the study of UDA-SS across video and image scenarios, enabling a more comprehensive understanding, synergistic advancements, and efficient knowledge sharing. To that end, we explore the unified UDA-SS from a general domain augmentation perspective, serving as a unifying framework, enabling improved generalization, and potential for cross-pollination, ultimately contributing to the practical impact and overall progress. Specifically, we propose a Quad-directional Mixup (QuadMix) method, characterized by tackling intra-domain discontinuity, fragmented gap bridging, and feature inconsistencies through four-directional paths designed for intra- and inter-domain mixing within an explicit feature space. To deal with temporal shifts within videos, we incorporate optical flow-guided feature aggregation across spatial and temporal dimensions for fine-grained domain alignment, which is extendable to image scenarios. Extensive experiments show that QuadMix outperforms the state-of-the-art works by large margins on four challenging UDA-SS benchmarks.