LabOR: Labeling Only if Required for Domain Adaptive Semantic Segmentation

Unsupervised Domain Adaptation (UDA) for semantic segmentation has been actively studied to mitigate the domain gap between label-rich source data and unlabeled target data. Despite these efforts, UDA still has a long way to go to reach the fully supervised performance. To this end, we propose a Labeling Only if Required strategy, LabOR, where we introduce a human-in-the-loop approach to adaptively give scarce labels to points that a UDA model is uncertain about. In order to find the uncertain points, we generate an inconsistency mask using the proposed adaptive pixel selector and we label these segment-based regions to achieve near supervised performance with only a small fraction (about 2.2%) ground truth points, which we call “Segment based Pixel-Labeling (SPL).” To further reduce the efforts of the human annotator, we also propose “Point based Pixel-Labeling (PPL),” which finds the most representative points for labeling within the generated inconsistency mask. This reduces efforts from 2.2% segment label → 40 points label while minimizing performance degradation. Through extensive experimentation, we show the advantages of this new framework for domain adaptive semantic segmentation while minimizing human labor costs.