Exploiting synthetic data to learn deep models has attracted increasing
attention in recent years. However, the intrinsic domain difference between
synthetic and real images usually causes a significant performance drop when
applying the learned model to real world scenarios. This is mainly due to two
reasons: 1) the model overfits to synthetic images, making the convolutional
filters incompetent to extract informative representation for real images; 2)
there is a distribution difference between synthetic and real data, which is
also known as the domain adaptation problem. To this end, we propose a new
reality oriented adaptation approach for urban scene semantic segmentation by
learning from synthetic data. First, we propose a target guided distillation
approach to learn the real image style, which is achieved by training the
segmentation model to imitate a pretrained real style model using real images.
Second, we further take advantage of the intrinsic spatial structure presented
in urban scene images, and propose a spatial-aware adaptation scheme to
effectively align the distribution of two domains. These two modules can be
readily integrated with existing state-of-the-art semantic segmentation
networks to improve their generalizability when adapting from synthetic to real
urban scenes. We evaluate the proposed method on Cityscapes dataset by adapting
from GTAV and SYNTHIA datasets, where the results demonstrate the effectiveness
of our method.

该论文提出了一种面向现实的域适应方法，通过学习合成数据，结合目标引导的蒸馏和空间感知的适应方案，可以提高语义分割网络从合成到真实城市场景的泛化能力。