DTBS: Dual-Teacher Bi-directional Self-training for Domain Adaptation in Nighttime Semantic Segmentation

Due to the poor illumination and the difficulty in annotating, nighttime conditions pose a significant challenge for autonomous vehicle perception systems. Unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) has been widely applied to semantic segmentation on such images to adapt models from normal conditions to target nighttime-condition domains. Self-training (ST) is a paradigm in UDA, where a momentum teacher is utilized for pseudo-label prediction, but a confirmation bias issue exists. Because the one-directional knowledge transfer from a single teacher is insufficient to adapt to a large domain shift. To mitigate this issue, we propose to alleviate domain gap by incrementally considering style influence and illumination change. Therefore, we introduce a one-stage Dual-Teacher Bi-directional Self-training (DTBS) framework for smooth knowledge transfer and feedback. Based on two teacher models, we present a novel pipeline to respectively decouple style and illumination shift. In addition, we propose a new Re-weight exponential moving average (EMA) to merge the knowledge of style and illumination factors, and provide feedback to the student model. In this way, our method can be embedded in other UDA methods to enhance their performance. For example, the Cityscapes to ACDC night task yielded 53.8 mIoU (%), which corresponds to an improvement of +5% over the previous state-of-the-art.