Light Transport Induced Domain Adaptation for Semantic Segmentation in Thermal Infrared Urban Scenes

Semantic segmentation in urban scenes is widely used in applications of intelligent transportation systems (ITS). In urban scenes, thermal infrared (TIR) images can be captured in weak illumination conditions or in the presence of obscuration (e.g., light fog, smoke). Therefore, TIR images have great potential to endow automated intelligent vehicles or assist navigation systems. However, TIR imaging is blurry and low-contrast due to the absorption by atmospheric gases and heat transfer effect. Hence, TIR semantic segmentation in urban scenes has rarely been explored even though it has a wide range of scenarios in ITS. To overcome this limitation, the authors analyze the light transport of TIR light. Their analysis reveals that contours are the reliable features shared by TIR and Visible Spectrum (VS) light. Inspired by this, they attempt to transfer joint features from VS domain to TIR domain. Thus, they propose a curriculum domain adaptation method to guide the TIR urban scene semantic segmentation task from VS domain through contours. Moreover, to evaluate the proposed model, they build TIR-SS: an open-for-request dataset consisting of TIR images and pixel level annotations of 8 classes in urban scenes. Qualitative and quantitative experimental results on the dataset indicate that the proposed domain adaptation method outperforms related methods on this TIR semantic segmentation task.

• Record URL:
  http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/TITS.2022.3194931
• Availability:
  • Find a library where document is available. Order URL: http://worldcat.org/oclc/41297384
• Supplemental Notes:
  • Copyright © 2022, IEEE.
• Authors:
  • Chen, Junzhang
  • Liu, Zhong
  • Yang, Fan
  • Bai, Xiangzhi
• Publication Date: 2022-12

Language

• English

Media Info

• Media Type: Web
• Features: References;
• Pagination: pp 23194-23211
• Serial:
  • IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems
  • Volume: 23
  • Issue Number: 12
  • Publisher: Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)
  • ISSN: 1524-9050
  • Serial URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/RecentIssue.jsp?punumber=6979

Subject/Index Terms

• TRT Terms: Cameras; Detection and identification systems; Image processing; Infrared imagery; Intelligent transportation systems; Urban transportation
• Subject Areas: Data and Information Technology; Highways; Vehicles and Equipment;

Filing Info

• Accession Number: 01877455
• Record Type: Publication
• Files: TRIS
• Created Date: Mar 27 2023 3:10PM