Semi-Supervised Drivable Road Segmentation with Expanded Feature Cross-Consistency

Drivable road segmentation aims to sense the surrounding environment to keep vehicles within safe road boundaries, which is fundamental in Advance Driver-Assistance Systems (ADASs). Existing deep learning-based supervised methods are able to achieve good performance in this field with large amounts of human-labeled training data. However, the process of collecting sufficient fine human-labeled data is extremely time-consuming and expensive. To fill this gap, in this paper, we innovatively propose a general yet effective semi-supervised method for drivable road segmentation with lower labeled-data dependency, high accuracy, and high real-time performance. Specifically, a main encoder and a main decoder are trained in the supervised mode with labeled data generating pseudo labels for the unsupervised training. Then, we innovatively set up both auxiliary encoders and auxiliary decoders in our model that yield feature representations and predictions based on the unlabeled data subjected to different elaborated perturbations. Both auxiliary encoders and decoders can leverage information in unlabeled data by enforcing consistency between predictions of the main modules and those perturbed versions from auxiliary modules. Experimental results on two public datasets (Cityspace and CamVid) verify that our proposed algorithm can almost reach the same performance with high FPS as a fully supervised method with 100% labeled data with only utilizing 40% labeled data in the field of drivable road segmentation. In addition, our semi-supervised algorithm has a good potential to be generalized to all models with an encoder–decoder structure.