Technical Approach

The majority of learning-based semantic segmentation methods are optimized for daytime scenarios and favorable lighting conditions. Real-world driving scenarios, however, entail adverse environmental conditions such as nighttime illumination or glare which remain a challenge for existing approaches. In this work, we propose a multimodal semantic segmentation model that can be applied during daytime and nighttime. To this end, besides RGB images, we leverage thermal images, making our network significantly more robust. We avoid the expensive annotation of nighttime images by leveraging an existing daytime RGB-dataset and propose a teacher-student training approach that transfers the dataset's knowledge to the nighttime domain. We further employ a domain adaptation method to align the learned feature spaces across the domains and propose a novel two-stage training scheme. Furthermore, due to a lack of thermal data for autonomous driving, we present a new dataset comprising over 20,000 time-synchronized and aligned RGB-thermal image pairs. In this context, we also present a novel target-less calibration method that allows for automatic robust extrinsic and intrinsic thermal camera calibration. Among others, we employ our new dataset to show state-of-the-art results for nighttime semantic segmentation.

Overview of the System
Our proposed HeatNet architecture uses both RGB and thermal images and is trained to predict segmentation masks in daytime and nighttime domains. We train our model with daytime supervision from a pre-trained RGB teacher model and with optional nighttime supervision from a pre-trained thermal teacher model trained on exclusively thermal images. We simultaneously minimize the cross entropy prediction loss to the teacher model prediction and minimize a domain confusion loss from a domain discriminator to reduce the domain gap between daytime and nighttime images.

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Dataset

Overview

To kindle research in the area of thermal image segmentation and to allow for credible quantitative evaluation, we create the large-scale dataset Freiburg Thermal. Our dataset was collected during 5 daytime and 3 nighttime data collection runs, spanning the seasons summer through winter. Overall, the dataset contains 12051 daytime and 8596 nighttime time-synchronized images using a stereo RGB camera rig (FLIR Blackfly 23S3C) and a stereo thermal camera rig (FLIR ADK) mounted on the roof of our data collection vehicle. In addition to images, we recorded the GPS/IMU data and LiDAR point clouds. The Freiburg Thermal dataset contains highly diverse driving scenarios including highways, densely populated urban areas, residential areas, and rural districts. We also provide a testing set comprising 32 daytime and 32 nighttime annotated images. Each image has pixel-wise semantic labels for 13 different object classes. Annotations are provided for the following classes: Road, Sidewalk, Building, Curb, Fence, Pole/Signs, Vegetation, Terrain, Sky, Person/Rider, Car/Truck/Bus/Train, Bicycle/Motorcycle, and Background. We deliberately selected extremely challenging urban and rural scenes with many traffic participants and changing illumination conditions.

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BibTex

Please cite our work if you use the FreiburgThermal dataset or report results based on it.

@article{vertens20bridging,
	title={HeatNet: Bridging the Day-Night Domain Gap in Semantic Segmentation with Thermal Images},
	author={Vertens, Johan, and Z{\"u}rn, Jannik and Burgard, Wolfram},
	journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2003.04645},
	year={2020}
}

License Agreement

The data is provided for non-commercial use only. By downloading the data, you accept the license agreement which can be downloaded here.

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Publications

  • Jannik Zürn, Wolfram Burgard, Abhinav Valada
    HeatNet: Bridging the Day-Night Domain Gap in Semantic Segmentation with Thermal Images
    ArXiv preprint arXiv:2003.04645, 2020.
    Bibtex

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