Segmenting Sky Pixels in Images: Analysis and Comparison

This work addresses sky segmentation, the task of determining sky and non-sky pixels in images, and improving upon existing state-of-the-art models. Outdoor scene parsing models are often trained on ideal datasets and produce high-quality results. However, this leads to inferior performance when applied to real-world images. The quality of scene parsing, particularly sky segmentation, decreases in night-time images, images involving varying weather conditions, and scene changes due to seasonal weather. We address these challenges using the RefineNet model in conjunction with two datasets: SkyFinder, and a subset of the SUN database containing sky regions (SUN-sky, henceforth). We achieve an improvement of 10-15% in the average MCR compared to prior methods using the SkyFinder dataset, and nearly 36% improvement from an off-the-shelf model in terms of average mIOU score. Employing fully connected conditional random fields as a post processing method demonstrates further enhancement of our results. Furthermore, by analyzing models over images with respect to two aspects, time of day and weather conditions, we find that when facing the same challenges as prior methods, our trained models significantly outperform them.