Towards Pragmatic Semantic Image Synthesis for Urban Scenes
George Eskandar Diandian Guo Karim Guirguis Bin Yang
The need for large amounts of training and validation data is a huge concern
in scaling AI algorithms for autonomous driving. Semantic Image Synthesis
(SIS), or label-to-image translation, promises to address this issue by
translating semantic layouts to images, providing a controllable generation of
photorealistic data. However, they require a large amount of paired data,
incurring extra costs. In this work, we present a new task: given a dataset
with synthetic images and labels and a dataset with unlabeled real images, our
goal is to learn a model that can generate images with the content of the input
mask and the appearance of real images. This new task reframes the well-known
unsupervised SIS task in a more practical setting, where we leverage cheaply
available synthetic data from a driving simulator to learn how to generate
photorealistic images of urban scenes. This stands in contrast to previous
works, which assume that labels and images come from the same domain but are
unpaired during training. We find that previous unsupervised works underperform
on this task, as they do not handle distribution shifts between two different
domains. To bypass these problems, we propose a novel framework with two main
contributions. First, we leverage the synthetic image as a guide to the content
of the generated image by penalizing the difference between their high-level
features on a patch level. Second, in contrast to previous works which employ
one discriminator that overfits the target domain semantic distribution, we
employ a discriminator for the whole image and multiscale discriminators on the
image patches. Extensive comparisons on the benchmarks GTA-V $\rightarrow$
Cityscapes and GTA-V $\rightarrow$ Mapillary show the superior performance of
the proposed model against state-of-the-art on this task.