On the Impact of Rain over Semantic Segmentation of Street Scenes

We investigate the negative effects of rain streaks over the performance of a neural network for real time semantic segmentation of street scenes. This is done by synthetically augmenting the CityScapes dataset with artificial rain. We then define and train a generative adversarial network for rain removal, and quantify the benefits of its application as a pre-processing step to both rainy and “clean” images. Finally, we show that by retraining the semantic segmentation network on images processed for rain removal, it is possible to gain even more accuracy, with a model that produces stable results in all analyzed atmospheric conditions. For our experiments, we present a per-class analysis in order to provide deeper insights over the impact of rain on semantic segmentation.