Learning Generalized Knowledge from a Single Domain on Urban-Scene Segmentation

Xinhui Li, Mingjia Li, Xiaopeng Li, Xiaojie Guo

Abstract: Deep neural networks have made significant progress in various tasks under the assumption of the same distribution between training and testing data. However, the obtained domain-specific knowledge often suffers from performance degradation when facing out-of-distribution data. Towards addressing the degradation, a critical requirement of such networks is the generalization capability to unseen domains, which is the goal of domain generalization (DG). This paper attempts to learn generalized knowledge from a single synthetic domain and then apply it to real and unknown scenarios. Specifically, we propose a contour-aware instance normalization module to effectively learn domain-invariant features via a novel weight-updating strategy,which can largely exploit the generalized information from the observed data. In addition, a category-level contrastive learning mechanism is proposed through understanding the semantic discrepancy and relevance among samples to mitigate the interference of domain-specific features on classification. Extensive experiments together with ablation studies on widely-adopted datasets are conducted to demonstrate the effectiveness of our design and show the superiority of our method over other state-of-the-art schemes on the task of urban-scene segmentation. The source code is available at https://github.com/leelxh/DG-LGK.