In Defense of Multi-Source Omni-Supervised Efficient ConvNet for Robust Semantic Segmentation in Heterogeneous Unseen Domains

Semantic segmentation renders a unified way of surrounding perception, where most of driving scene detection tasks can be covered by running a single efficient ConvNet through a forward pass. However, current frameworks posit the closed-world paradigm expressed as a single source of distribution over a predetermined set of visual classes, forgetting that a deep model must be deployed in the wild facing unseen domains and unforeseen hazards. In spite of being accurate in its comfort zone, the segmentation model may not generalize well to a new domain. In addition, a model trained with single dataset is heavily limited in terms of recognizable classes. In this paper, we propose an omni-supervised learning framework for semantic segmentation which is able to leverage heterogeneous data sources. Our omni-supervised training framework incorporates all available labeled and unlabeled data, meanwhile bridges multiple training sets to be capable of recognizing more classes that are needed for autonomous navigation application at hand in the new domain. A comprehensive variety of experiments shows that with the proposed multi-source omni-supervised learning solution, an efficient ConvNet like our ERF-PSPNet attains significant robustness gains in open domains that are of critical relevance to real deployment of vision algorithms. Our approach surpasses the state of the art on the highly unconstrained PASS and IDD20K datasets.