Adversarial Style Augmentation for Domain Generalized Urban-Scene Segmentation

In this paper, we consider the problem of domain generalization in semantic segmentation,
which aims to learn a robust model using only labeled synthetic (source)
data. The model is expected to perform well on unseen real (target) domains.
Our study finds that the image style variation can largely influence the model’s
performance and the style features can be well represented by the channel-wise
mean and standard deviation of images. Inspired by this, we propose a novel adversarial
style augmentation (AdvStyle) approach, which can dynamically generate
hard stylized images during training and thus can effectively prevent the model
from overfitting on the source domain. Specifically, AdvStyle regards the style
feature as a learnable parameter and updates it by adversarial training. The learned
adversarial style feature is used to construct an adversarial image for robust model
training. AdvStyle is easy to implement and can be readily applied to different
models. Experiments on two synthetic-to-real semantic segmentation benchmarks
demonstrate that AdvStyle can significantly improve the model performance on
unseen real domains and show that we can achieve the state of the art. Moreover,
AdvStyle can be employed to domain generalized image classification and produces
a clear improvement on the considered datasets.