Linwei-Chen/awesome-degraded-segmentation

A Survey on Degraded Image Segmentation

A comprehensive survey on robust image segmentation under various degradation conditions

Paper | Paper List | Project Page

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Abstract

Segmentation is the core of visual understanding — the foundation of Physical AI and World Model.

Image segmentation is a fundamental task in computer vision with wide-ranging applications. While deep learning models have achieved remarkable success under ideal conditions, their performance often degrades catastrophically when faced with real-world image corruptions. These corruptions span several key categories, including adverse weather (e.g., fog, rain, snow), challenging light (e.g., nighttime, low-light), digital artifacts from processing (e.g., compression, color jitter), various forms of blur (e.g., motion, defocus), and pervasive noise (e.g., sensor noise, speckle).

This survey provides a comprehensive and structured overview of the field of degraded image segmentation. We establish a detailed taxonomy of common image degradations impacting segmentation tasks. We review a wide array of datasets and benchmarks designed for evaluating robustness. Furthermore, we systematically analyze state-of-the-art methodologies, categorized by their core technical strategies: Domain Adaptation and Generalization, Joint Restoration-Segmentation techniques, and Multi-modal Fusion.

This survey is essential for autonomous driving, robotics, and real-world AI systems — the core pillars of Physical AI.

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Degradation Examples

Examples of various image degradation types: weather, light, digital, blur, and noise.

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Physical AI Applications

Degraded image segmentation is fundamental to Physical AI — enabling reliable perception for autonomous vehicles and robots in real-world environments.

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Highlights

• 135+ papers systematically organized following the survey's methodology taxonomy
• 37 papers with open-source code are marked with code links
• Comprehensive coverage of 5 degradation categories: Weather, Light, Digital, Blur, Noise
• 3 main methodological strategies: Domain Adaptation/Generalization, Joint Restoration-Segmentation, Multi-modal Fusion
• Essential for Physical AI — the foundation of autonomous driving, robotics, and real-world AI systems

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Paper List

Papers with available code are marked with a code link in the "Code" column.

1. Domain Adaptation & Generalization (DA/DG)

1.1 Adversarial Learning Approaches

Title	Authors	Year	Venue	Code	BibTeX
ICDA: Illumination-Coupled Domain Adaptation Framework for Unsupervised Nighttim...	Dong et al.	2023	IJCAI	Code	BibTeX
A one-stage domain adaptation network with image alignment for unsupervised nigh...	Wu et al.	2021	PAMI	Code	BibTeX
Dual-branch teacher-student with noise-tolerant learning for domain adaptive nig...	Chen et al.	2024	Image and Vision Com...	-	BibTeX
Weakly supervised semantic segmentation for point cloud based on view-based adve...	Miao et al.	2023	Computers & Graphic...	-	BibTeX
All-weather road drivable area segmentation method based on CycleGAN	Jiqing et al.	2023	The Visual Computer	-	BibTeX
FISS GAN: A generative adversarial network for foggy image semantic segmentation	Liu et al.	2021	IEEE/CAA Journal of ...	-	BibTeX
Semantic segmentation with unsupervised domain adaptation under varying weather ...	Erkent et al.	2020	IEEE Robotics and Au...	-	BibTeX
Nighttime road scene parsing by unsupervised domain adaptation	Song et al.	2020	IEEE transactions on...	-	BibTeX
Heatnet: Bridging the day-night domain gap in semantic segmentation with thermal...	Vertens et al.	2020	2020 IEEE/RSJ Intern...	-	BibTeX
Advent: Adversarial entropy minimization for domain adaptation in semantic segme...	Vu et al.	2019	CVPR	-	BibTeX

1.2 Feature Alignment

Title	Authors	Year	Venue	Code	BibTeX
Condition-invariant semantic segmentation	Sakaridis et al.	2025	PAMI	Code	BibTeX
Contrastive model adaptation for cross-condition robustness in semantic segmenta...	Br{""u et al.	2023	ICCV	Code	BibTeX
Degraded Image Semantic Segmentation Using Intra-image and Inter-image Contrasti...	Dong et al.	2023	China Automation Con...	Code	BibTeX
Cross-domain correlation distillation for unsupervised domain adaptation in nigh...	Gao et al.	2022	CVPR	Code	BibTeX
Computational Imaging for Machine Perception: Transferring Semantic Segmentation...	Jiang et al.	2024	IEEE Transactions on...	-	BibTeX
Refign: Align and refine for adaptation of semantic segmentation to adverse cond...	Br{""u et al.	2023	WACV	-	BibTeX
Fifo: Learning fog-invariant features for foggy scene segmentation.	Lee et al.	2022	CVPR	-	BibTeX
Cluster alignment with target knowledge mining for unsupervised domain adaptatio...	Wang et al.	2022	IEEE Transactions on...	-	BibTeX
Learning intra-domain style-invariant representation for unsupervised domain ada...	Li et al.	2022	Pattern Recognition	-	BibTeX
Semantic nighttime image segmentation via illumination and position aware domain...	Peng et al.	2021	2021 IEEE Internatio...	-	BibTeX
Learning texture invariant representation for domain adaptation of semantic segm...	Kim et al.	2020	CVPR	-	BibTeX
Degraded image semantic segmentation with dense-gram networks	Guo et al.	2019	IEEE Transactions on...	-	BibTeX
Ssf-dan: Separated semantic feature based domain adaptation network for semantic...	Du et al.	2019	ICCV	-	BibTeX

1.3 Feature Decomposition

Title	Authors	Year	Venue	Code	BibTeX
Learning generalized segmentation for foggy-scenes by bi-directional wavelet gui...	Bi et al.	2024	the AAAI Conference ...	Code	BibTeX
When semantic segmentation meets frequency aliasing	Chen et al.	2024	ICLR	Code	BibTeX
All about structure: Adapting structural information across domains for boosting...	Chang et al.	2019	CVPR	Code	BibTeX
Generalized Foggy-Scene Semantic Segmentation by Frequency Decoupling	Bi et al.	2024	CVPR	-	BibTeX
DDFL: Dual-Domain Feature Learning for nighttime semantic segmentation	Lin et al.	2024	Displays	-	BibTeX
Disentangle then Parse: Night-time Semantic Segmentation with Illumination Disen...	Wei et al.	2023	ICCV	-	BibTeX
Interactive learning of intrinsic and extrinsic properties for all-day semantic ...	Bi et al.	2023	IEEE Transactions on...	-	BibTeX
Both style and fog matter: Cumulative domain adaptation for semantic foggy scene...	Ma et al.	2022	CVPR	-	BibTeX

1.4 Self-Training & Pseudo-Labeling

Title	Authors	Year	Venue	Code	BibTeX
Stable Neighbor Denoising for Source-free Domain Adaptive Segmentation	Zhao et al.	2024	CVPR	Code	BibTeX
Self pseudo entropy knowledge distillation for semi-supervised semantic segmenta...	Lu et al.	2024	IEEE Transactions on...	Code	BibTeX
VBLC: Visibility boosting and logit-constraint learning for domain adaptive sema...	Li et al.	2023	the AAAI Conference ...	Code	BibTeX
LoopDA: Constructing self-loops to adapt nighttime semantic segmentation	Shen et al.	2023	WACV	Code	BibTeX
Dtbs: Dual-teacher bi-directional self-training for domain adaptation in nightti...	Huang et al.	2023	European Conference ...	Code	BibTeX
Online domain adaptation for semantic segmentation in ever-changing conditions	Panagiotakopoulos et al.	2022	European Conference ...	Code	BibTeX
Bidirectional learning for domain adaptation of semantic segmentation	Li et al.	2019	CVPR	Code	BibTeX
Source-Free Online Domain Adaptive Semantic Segmentation of Satellite Images Und...	Niloy et al.	2024	ICASSP 2024-2024 IEE...	-	BibTeX
SDAT-Former++: A Foggy Scene Semantic Segmentation Method with Stronger Domain A...	Wang et al.	2023	Remote Sensing	-	BibTeX
A Two-Stage Self-Training Framework for Nighttime Semantic Segmentation	Yang et al.	2023	2023 38th Youth Acad...	-	BibTeX
SGDA: A Saliency-Guided Domain Adaptation Network for Nighttime Semantic Segment...	Duan et al.	2023	2023 IEEE 6th Intern...	-	BibTeX
Dual-level Consistency Learning for Unsupervised Domain Adaptive Night-time Sema...	Ding et al.	2023	2023 IEEE Internatio...	-	BibTeX
MADA: Multi-Level Alignment in Domain Adaptation Network for Nighttime Semantic ...	Xu et al.	2023	2023 8th Internation...	-	BibTeX
A hybrid domain learning framework for unsupervised semantic segmentation	Zhang et al.	2023	Neurocomputing	-	BibTeX
FogAdapt: Self-supervised domain adaptation for semantic segmentation of foggy i...	Iqbal et al.	2022	Neurocomputing	-	BibTeX
Unsupervised foggy scene understanding via self spatial-temporal label diffusion	Liao et al.	2022	IEEE Transactions on...	-	BibTeX
Augmentation consistency-guided self-training for source-free domain adaptive se...	Prabhu et al.	2022	NeurIPS 2022 Worksho...	-	BibTeX
SS-SFDA: Self-supervised source-free domain adaptation for road segmentation in ...	Kothandaraman et al.	2021	ICCV	-	BibTeX
CDAda: A curriculum domain adaptation for nighttime semantic segmentation	Xu et al.	2021	ICCV	-	BibTeX
RanPaste: Paste consistency and pseudo label for semisupervised remote sensing i...	Wang et al.	2021	IEEE Transactions on...	-	BibTeX

1.5 Knowledge Distillation

Title	Authors	Year	Venue	Code	BibTeX
Lightweight deep learning methods for panoramic dental X-ray image segmentation	Lin et al.	2023	Neural Computing and...	Code	BibTeX
Weather-degraded image semantic segmentation with multi-task knowledge distillat...	Li et al.	2022	Image and Vision Com...	-	BibTeX
Self-feature distillation with uncertainty modeling for degraded image recogniti...	Yang et al.	2022	European Conference ...	-	BibTeX
Robust semantic segmentation with multi-teacher knowledge distillation	Amirkhani et al.	2021	IEEE Access	-	BibTeX
Efficient uncertainty estimation in semantic segmentation via distillation	Holder et al.	2021	ICCV	-	BibTeX

1.6 Test-Time Adaptation & Continual Learning

Title	Authors	Year	Venue	Code	BibTeX
Privacy-Preserving Synthetic Continual Semantic Segmentation for Robotic Surgery	Xu et al.	2024	IEEE Transactions on...	Code	BibTeX
Enhanced Model Robustness to Input Corruptions by Per-corruption Adaptation of N...	Camuffo et al.	2024	2024 IEEE/RSJ Intern...	-	BibTeX
Test-time adaptation for nighttime color-thermal semantic segmentation	Liu et al.	2023	IEEE Transactions on...	-	BibTeX
Test-time training for matching-based video object segmentation	Bertrand et al.	2023	Advances in Neural I...	-	BibTeX
Top-K Confidence Map Aggregation for Robust Semantic Segmentation Against Unexpe...	Moriyasu et al.	2023	2023 IEEE Internatio...	-	BibTeX
Principles of forgetting in domain-incremental semantic segmentation in adverse ...	Kalb et al.	2023	CVPR	-	BibTeX
Rethinking exemplars for continual semantic segmentation in endoscopy scenes: En...	Wang et al.	2023	Computers in Biology...	-	BibTeX
To adapt or not to adapt? real-time adaptation for semantic segmentation	Colomer et al.	2023	ICCV	-	BibTeX
Continual test-time domain adaptation	Wang et al.	2022	CVPR	-	BibTeX
Continual unsupervised domain adaptation for semantic segmentation using a class...	Marsden et al.	2022	2022 International J...	-	BibTeX

1.7 Other DA/DG Strategies

Title	Authors	Year	Venue	Code	BibTeX
A Re-Parameterized Vision Transformer (ReVT) for Domain-Generalized Semantic Seg...	Term{""o et al.	2023	ICCV	Code	BibTeX
Map-guided curriculum domain adaptation and uncertainty-aware evaluation for sem...	Sakaridis et al.	2020	PAMI	Code	BibTeX
Complementary Masked-Guided Meta-Learning for Domain Adaptive Nighttime Segmenta...	Chen et al.	2024	IEEE Signal Processi...	-	BibTeX
CAT: Exploiting Inter-Class Dynamics for Domain Adaptive Object Detection	Kennerley et al.	2024	CVPR	-	BibTeX
Learning to learn single domain generalization	Qiao et al.	2020	CVPR	-	BibTeX
Curriculum model adaptation with synthetic and real data for semantic foggy scen...	Dai et al.	2020	International Journa...	-	BibTeX
Guided curriculum model adaptation and uncertainty-aware evaluation for semantic...	Sakaridis et al.	2019	ICCV	-	BibTeX
Model adaptation with synthetic and real data for semantic dense foggy scene und...	Sakaridis et al.	2018	ECCV	-	BibTeX

2. Joint Restoration & Segmentation

2.1 Dehazing/Defogging + Segmentation

Title	Authors	Year	Venue	Code	BibTeX
Improving semantic segmentation under hazy weather for autonomous vehicles using...	Saravanarajan et al.	2023	IEEE Access	-	BibTeX
Budget-Aware Road Semantic Segmentation in Unseen Foggy Scenes	To et al.	2023	International Confer...	-	BibTeX
Rethinking image restoration for object detection	Sun et al.	2022	Advances in Neural I...	-	BibTeX
Cooperative semantic segmentation and image restoration in adverse environmental...	Xia et al.	2019	arXiv preprint arXiv...	-	BibTeX
A convolutional network for joint deraining and dehazing from a single image for...	Sun et al.	2019	2019 IEEE/RSJ Intern...	-	BibTeX

2.2 Deraining + Segmentation

Title	Authors	Year	Venue	Code	BibTeX
DRNet: Learning a dynamic recursion network for chaotic rain streak removal	Jiang et al.	2025	Pattern Recognition	Code	BibTeX
Rainy day image semantic segmentation based on two-stage progressive network	Zhang et al.	2024	The Visual Computer	Code	BibTeX
RCDNet: An interpretable rain convolutional dictionary network for single image ...	Wang et al.	2023	IEEE Transactions on...	Code	BibTeX
SAPNet: Segmentation-aware progressive network for perceptual contrastive derain...	Zheng et al.	2022	WACV	Code	BibTeX
Beyond monocular deraining: Parallel stereo deraining network via semantic prior	Zhang et al.	2022	International Journa...	Code	BibTeX
Towards robust rain removal against adversarial attacks: A comprehensive benchma...	Yu et al.	2022	CVPR	Code	BibTeX
A De-raining semantic segmentation network for real-time foreground segmentation	Wang et al.	2021	Journal of Real-Time...	Code	BibTeX
Style Optimization Networks for real-time semantic segmentation of rainy and fog...	Huang et al.	2025	Signal Processing: I...	-	BibTeX
Learning A Rain-Invariant Network For Instance Segmentation In The Rain	Chen et al.	2024	2024 IEEE Internatio...	-	BibTeX
Real rainy scene analysis: A dual-module benchmark for image deraining and segme...	Zhao et al.	2023	2023 IEEE Internatio...	-	BibTeX
Improved sea-ice identification using semantic segmentation with raindrop remova...	Alsharay et al.	2022	IEEE Access	-	BibTeX
I can see clearly now: Image restoration via de-raining	Porav et al.	2019	ICRA	-	BibTeX

2.3 Denoising + Segmentation

Title	Authors	Year	Venue	Code	BibTeX
Instance Segmentation in the Dark	Chen et al.	2023	IJCV	Code	BibTeX
AATCT-IDS: A benchmark Abdominal Adipose Tissue CT Image Dataset for image denoi...	Ma et al.	2024	Computers in Biology...	-	BibTeX
Multi task deep learning phase unwrapping method based on semantic segmentation	Wang et al.	2024	Journal of Optics	-	BibTeX
Plug-and-Play Joint Image Deblurring and Detection	Marrs et al.	2023	2023 IEEE 25th Inter...	-	BibTeX
Segmentation-guided semantic-aware self-supervised denoising for SAR image	Yuan et al.	2023	IEEE Transactions on...	-	BibTeX
Denoising pretraining for semantic segmentation	Brempong et al.	2022	CVPR_Workshops	-	BibTeX
Speckle reduction via deep content-aware image prior for precise breast tumor se...	Lee et al.	2022	IEEE Transactions on...	-	BibTeX
Efnet: Enhancement-fusion network for semantic segmentation	Wang et al.	2021	Pattern Recognition	-	BibTeX
Effective image restoration for semantic segmentation	Niu et al.	2020	Neurocomputing	-	BibTeX
Dapas: Denoising autoencoder to prevent adversarial attack in semantic segmentat...	Cho et al.	2020	2020 International J...	-	BibTeX
Improved denoising autoencoder for maritime image denoising and semantic segment...	Qiu et al.	2020	China Communications	-	BibTeX
DN-GAN: Denoising generative adversarial networks for speckle noise reduction in...	Chen et al.	2020	Biomedical Signal Pr...	-	BibTeX

2.4 Deblurring + Segmentation

Title	Authors	Year	Venue	Code	BibTeX
Turb-Seg-Res: A Segment-then-Restore Pipeline for Dynamic Videos with Atmospheri...	Saha et al.	2024	CVPR	-	BibTeX
Automatic extraction of blur regions on a single image based on semantic segment...	Shen et al.	2020	IEEE Access	-	BibTeX
Joint stereo video deblurring, scene flow estimation and moving object segmentat...	Pan et al.	2019	IEEE Transactions on...	-	BibTeX
From motion blur to motion flow: A deep learning solution for removing heterogen...	Gong et al.	2017	CVPR	-	BibTeX

2.5 Snow/Dust Removal + Segmentation

Title	Authors	Year	Venue	Code	BibTeX
Deep dense multi-scale network for snow removal using semantic and depth priors	Zhang et al.	2021	IEEE Transactions on...	Code	BibTeX
Semantic Segmentation and Inpainting of Dust with the S-Dust Dataset	Buckel et al.	2023	International Federa...	-	BibTeX

2.6 Low-Light Enhancement + Segmentation

Title	Authors	Year	Venue	Code	BibTeX
Nighttime image semantic segmentation with retinex theory	Sun et al.	2024	Image and Vision Com...	Code	BibTeX
Improving nighttime driving-scene segmentation via dual image-adaptive learnable...	Liu et al.	2023	IEEE Transactions on...	Code	BibTeX
Toward fast, flexible, and robust low-light image enhancement	Ma et al.	2022	CVPR	Code	BibTeX
Lane detection based on real-time semantic segmentation for end-to-end autonomou...	Liu et al.	2024	Digital Signal Proce...	-	BibTeX
Towards learning low-light indoor semantic segmentation with illumination-invari...	Zhang et al.	2021	The International Ar...	-	BibTeX

2.7 JPEG Decoding + Segmentation

Title	Authors	Year	Venue	Code	BibTeX
DSSLIC: Deep semantic segmentation-based layered image compression	Akbari et al.	2019	IEEE International C...	Code	BibTeX
DCT-CompSegNet: fast layout segmentation in DCT compressed JPEG document images ...	Rajesh et al.	2024	Multimedia Tools and...	-	BibTeX
Semantic segmentation in learned compressed domain	Liu et al.	2022	Picture Coding Sympo...	-	BibTeX
Reverse error modeling for improved semantic segmentation	Kuhn et al.	2022	IEEE International C...	-	BibTeX
Deep learning based image segmentation directly in the jpeg compressed domain	Singh et al.	2021	2021 IEEE 8th Uttar ...	-	BibTeX
Semantic segmentation of JPEG blocks using a deep CNN for non-aligned JPEG forge...	Alipour et al.	2020	Multimedia Tools and...	-	BibTeX

3. Multi-Modal Fusion

3.1 RGB + Thermal Fusion

Title	Authors	Year	Venue	Code	BibTeX
MCNet: Multi-level correction network for thermal image semantic segmentation of...	Xiong et al.	2021	Infrared Physics & ...	Code	BibTeX
Illumination Robust Semantic Segmentation Based on Cross-dimensional Multispectr...	Ni et al.	2024	IEEE Access	-	BibTeX
CCAFFMNet: Dual-spectral semantic segmentation network with channel-coordinate a...	Yi et al.	2022	Neurocomputing	-	BibTeX
FuseSeg: Semantic segmentation of urban scenes based on RGB and thermal data fus...	Sun et al.	2020	IEEE Transactions on...	-	BibTeX
Robust semantic segmentation in adverse weather conditions by means of sensor da...	Pfeuffer et al.	2019	International Confer...	-	BibTeX
RTFNet: RGB-thermal fusion network for semantic segmentation of urban scenes	Sun et al.	2019	IEEE Robotics and Au...	-	BibTeX

3.2 RGB + LiDAR/Depth Fusion

Title	Authors	Year	Venue	Code	BibTeX
Low-Light Enhancement and Global-Local Feature Interaction for RGB-T Semantic Se...	Guo et al.	2025	IEEE Transactions on...	Code	BibTeX
Adaptive Entropy Multi-modal Fusion for Nighttime Lane Segmentation	Zhang et al.	2024	IEEE Transactions on...	-	BibTeX
Delivering arbitrary-modal semantic segmentation	Zhang et al.	2023	CVPR	-	BibTeX
Multi-robot collaborative perception with graph neural networks	Zhou et al.	2022	IEEE Robotics and Au...	-	BibTeX
Multi-modal sensor fusion-based semantic segmentation for snow driving scenarios	Vachmanus et al.	2021	IEEE sensors journal	-	BibTeX
UNO: Uncertainty-aware noisy-or multimodal fusion for unanticipated input degrad...	Tian et al.	2020	ICRA	-	BibTeX

3.3 RGB + Event Camera Fusion

Title	Authors	Year	Venue	Code	BibTeX
Event-assisted low-light video object segmentation	Li et al.	2024	CVPR	Code	BibTeX
Cmda: Cross-modality domain adaptation for nighttime semantic segmentation	Xia et al.	2023	ICCV	Code	BibTeX
Semantic Segmentation Research of Motion Blurred Images by Event Camera	Liu et al.	2023	International Confer...	-	BibTeX

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Citation

If you find this survey helpful, please cite:

@article{chen2026degraded,
  title={A Survey on Degraded Image Segmentation},
  author={Chen, Linwei and Fu, Ying and Shangguan, Jingyu and Xu, Jinglin and Peng, Yuxin},
  journal={Chinese Journal of Electronics},
  year={2026}
}

Contributing

We welcome contributions! Please feel free to submit a Pull Request to add new papers or fix any issues.

Contact

• Linwei Chen - chenlinwei.ai@gmail.com
• Ying Fu (Corresponding Author) - fuying@bit.edu.cn

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