  Semantic segmentation of outdoor scenes is problematic when there are
variations in imaging conditions. It is known that albedo (reflectance) is
invariant to all kinds of illumination effects. Thus, using reflectance images
for semantic segmentation task can be favorable. Additionally, not only
segmentation may benefit from reflectance, but also segmentation may be useful
for reflectance computation. Therefore, in this paper, the tasks of semantic
segmentation and intrinsic image decomposition are considered as a combined
process by exploring their mutual relationship in a joint fashion. To that end,
we propose a supervised end-to-end CNN architecture to jointly learn intrinsic
image decomposition and semantic segmentation. We analyze the gains of
addressing those two problems jointly. Moreover, new cascade CNN architectures
for intrinsic-for-segmentation and segmentation-for-intrinsic are proposed as
single tasks. Furthermore, a dataset of 35K synthetic images of natural
environments is created with corresponding albedo and shading (intrinsics), as
well as semantic labels (segmentation) assigned to each object/scene. The
experiments show that joint learning of intrinsic image decomposition and
semantic segmentation is beneficial for both tasks for natural scenes. Dataset
and models are available at: https://ivi.fnwi.uva.nl/cv/intrinseg
