Night-time Semantic Segmentation with a Large Real Dataset

Although huge progress has been made on semantic segmentation in recent years, most existing works assume that the input images are captured in day-time with good lighting conditions. In this work, we aim to address the semantic segmentation problem of night-time scenes, which has two main challenges: 1) labeled night-time data are scarce, and 2) over- and under-exposures may co-occur in the input night-time images and are not explicitly modeled in existing semantic segmentation pipelines. To tackle the scarcity of night-time data, we collect a novel labeled dataset (named NightCity) of 4,297 real night-time images with ground truth pixel-level semantic annotations. To our knowledge, NightCity is the largest dataset for night-time semantic segmentation. In addition, we also propose an exposure-aware framework to address the night-time segmentation problem through augmenting the segmentation process with explicitly learned exposure features. Extensive experiments show that training on NightCity can significantly improve the performance of night-time semantic segmentation and that our exposure-aware model outperforms the state-of-the-art segmentation methods, yielding top performances on our benchmark dataset.