FD-DB: Frequency-Decoupled Dual-Branch Network for Unpaired Synthetic-to-Real Domain Translation

TL;DR

FD-DB is a novel frequency-decoupled dual-branch network that improves unpaired synthetic-to-real domain translation by separating appearance transfer into interpretable low-frequency editing and high-frequency residuals, enhancing realism and downstream task performance.

Contribution

The paper introduces FD-DB, a frequency-decoupled dual-branch model with a two-stage training schedule, enabling stable and effective unpaired synthetic-to-real translation with improved appearance consistency.

Findings

Enhances appearance consistency in real domain

Boosts downstream semantic segmentation performance

Preserves geometric and semantic structures

Abstract

Synthetic data provide low-cost, accurately annotated samples for geometry-sensitive vision tasks, but appearance and imaging differences between synthetic and real domains cause severe domain shift and degrade downstream performance. Unpaired synthetic-to-real translation can reduce this gap without paired supervision, yet existing methods often face a trade-off between photorealism and structural stability: unconstrained generation may introduce deformation or spurious textures, while overly rigid constraints limit adaptation to real-domain statistics. We propose FD-DB, a frequency-decoupled dual-branch model that separates appearance transfer into low-frequency interpretable editing and high-frequency residual compensation. The interpretable branch predicts physically meaningful editing parameters (white balance, exposure, contrast, saturation, blur, and grain) to build a stable low-frequency appearance base with strong content preservation. The free branch complements fine details through residual generation, and a gated fusion mechanism combines the two branches under explicit frequency constraints to limit low-frequency drift. We further adopt a two-stage training schedule that first stabilizes the editing branch and then releases the residual branch to improve optimization stability. Experiments on the YCB-V dataset show that FD-DB improves real-domain appearance consistency and significantly boosts downstream semantic segmentation performance while preserving geometric and semantic structures.