  Classical semantic segmentation methods, including the recent deep learning
ones, assume that all classes observed at test time have been seen during
training. In this paper, we tackle the more realistic scenario where unexpected
objects of unknown classes can appear at test time. The main trends in this
area either leverage the notion of prediction uncertainty to flag the regions
with low confidence as unknown, or rely on autoencoders and highlight
poorly-decoded regions. Having observed that, in both cases, the detected
regions typically do not correspond to unexpected objects, in this paper, we
introduce a drastically different strategy: It relies on the intuition that the
network will produce spurious labels in regions depicting unexpected objects.
Therefore, resynthesizing the image from the resulting semantic map will yield
significant appearance differences with respect to the input image. In other
words, we translate the problem of detecting unknown classes to one of
identifying poorly-resynthesized image regions. We show that this outperforms
both uncertainty- and autoencoder-based methods.
