Dual-mode training with style control and quality enhancement for road image domain adaptation

Dealing properly with different viewing conditions remains a key challenge for computer vision in autonomous driving. Domain adaptation has opened new possibilities for data augmentation, translating arbitrary road scene images into different environmental conditions. Although multimodal concepts have demonstrated the capability to separate content and style, we find that existing methods fail to reproduce scenes in the exact appearance given by a reference image. In this paper, we address the aforementioned problem by introducing a style alignment loss between output and reference image. We integrate this concept into a multimodal unsupervised image-to-image translation model with a novel dual-mode training process and additional adversarial losses. Focusing on road scene images, we evaluate our model in various aspects including visual quality and feature matching. Our experiments reveal that we are able to significantly improve both style alignment and image quality in different viewing conditions. Adapting concepts from neural style transfer, our new training approach allows to control the output of multimodal domain adaptation, making it possible to generate arbitrary scenes and viewing conditions for data augmentation.