  During the last half decade, convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have
triumphed over semantic segmentation, which is one of the core tasks in many
applications such as autonomous driving. However, to train CNNs requires a
considerable amount of data, which is difficult to collect and laborious to
annotate. Recent advances in computer graphics make it possible to train CNNs
on photo-realistic synthetic imagery with computer-generated annotations.
Despite this, the domain mismatch between the real images and the synthetic
data cripples the models' performance. Hence, we propose a curriculum-style
learning approach to minimize the domain gap in urban scenery semantic
segmentation. The curriculum domain adaptation solves easy tasks first to infer
necessary properties about the target domain; in particular, the first task is
to learn global label distributions over images and local distributions over
landmark superpixels. These are easy to estimate because images of urban scenes
have strong idiosyncrasies (e.g., the size and spatial relations of buildings,
streets, cars, etc.). We then train a segmentation network while regularizing
its predictions in the target domain to follow those inferred properties. In
experiments, our method outperforms the baselines on two datasets and two
backbone networks. We also report extensive ablation studies about our
approach.
