Deep learning has become the method of choice to tackle real-world problems in different domains, partly because of its ability to learn from data and achieve impressive performance on a wide range of applications. However, its success usually relies on two assumptions: (i) vast troves of labeled datasets are required for accurate model fitting, and (ii) training and testing data are independent and identically distributed. Its performance on unseen target domains, thus, is not guaranteed, especially when encountering out-of-distribution data at the adaptation stage. The performance drop on data in a target domain is a critical problem in deploying deep neural networks that are successfully trained on data in a source domain. Unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) is proposed to counter this, by leveraging both labeled source domain data and unlabeled target domain data to carry out various tasks in the target domain. UDA has yielded promising results on natural image processing, video analysis, natural language processing, time-series data analysis, medical image analysis, etc. In this review, as a rapidly evolving topic, we provide a systematic comparison of its methods and applications. In addition, the connection of UDA with its closely related tasks, e.g., domain generalization and out-of-distribution detection, has also been discussed. Furthermore, deficiencies in current methods and possible promising directions are highlighted.

Deep Unsupervised Domain Adaptation: A Review of Recent Advances and Perspectives

Object detection in traffic scenes has attracted considerable attention from both academia and industry recently. Modern detectors achieve excellent performance under a simple constrained environment while performing poorly under the actual complex and open traffic environment. Therefore, the capability of adapting to new and unseen domains is a key factor for the large-scale application and proliferation of detectors in autonomous driving. To this end, this paper proposes a novel category-induced coarse-to-fine domain adaptation approach (C2FDA) for cross-domain object detection, which consists of three pivotal components: (1) Attention-induced coarse-grained alignment module (ACGA), which strengthens the distribution alignment across disparate domains within the foreground features in category-agnostic way by the minimax optimization between the domain classifier and the backbone feature extractor; (2) Attention-induced feature selection module, which assists the model to emphasize the crucial foreground features and enables the ACGA to focus on the relevant and discriminative foreground features, without being affected by the distribution of inconsequential background features; (3) Category-induced fine-grained alignment module (CFGA), which reduces the domain shift in category-aware way by minimizing the distance of centroids with the same category from different domains and maximizing that of centroids with disparate categories. We evaluate the performance of our approach in various source/target domain pairs and comprehensive results demonstrate that C2FDA significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art on multiple domain adaptation scenarios, i.e., the synthetic-to-real adaptation, the weather adaptation, and the cross camera adaptation. 

C2FDA: Coarse-to-Fine Domain Adaptation for Traffic Object Detection

Semi-supervised object detection has made significant progress with the development of mean teacher driven self-training. Despite the promising results, the label mismatch problem is not yet fully explored in the previous works, leading to severe confirmation bias during self-training. In this paper, we delve into this problem and propose a simple yet effective LabelMatch framework from two different yet complementary perspectives, i.e., distribution-level and instance-level. For the former one, it is reasonable to approximate the class distribution of the unlabeled data from that of the labeled data according to Monte Carlo Sampling. Guided by this weakly supervision cue, we introduce a re-distribution mean teacher, which leverages adaptive label-distribution-aware confidence thresholds to generate unbiased pseudo labels to drive student learning. For the latter one, there exists an overlooked label assignment ambiguity problem across teacher-student models. To remedy this issue, we present a novel label assignment mechanism for self-training framework, namely proposal self-assignment, which injects the proposals from student into teacher and generates accurate pseudo labels to match each proposal in the student model accordingly. Experiments on both MS-COCO and PASCAL-VOC datasets demonstrate the considerable superiority of our proposed framework to other state-of-the-arts. Code will be available at https://github.com/HIK-LAB/SSOD.

Label Matching Semi-Supervised Object Detection

Domain Adaptive Object Detection (DAOD) leverages a labeled domain to learn an object detector generalizing to a novel domain free of annotations. Recent advances align class-conditional distributions by narrowing down cross-domain prototypes (class centers). Though great success, they ignore the significant within-class variance and the domain-mismatched semantics within the training batch, leading to a sub-optimal adaptation. To overcome these challenges, we propose a novel SemantIc-complete Graph MAtching (SIGMA) framework for DAOD, which completes mismatched semantics and reformulates the adaptation with graph matching. Specifically, we design a Graph-embedded Semantic Completion module (GSC) that completes mis-matched semantics through generating hallucination graph nodes in missing categories. Then, we establish cross-image graphs to model class-conditional distributions and learn a graph-guided memory bank for better semantic completion in turn. After representing the source and target data as graphs, we reformulate the adaptation as a graph matching problem, i.e., finding well-matched node pairs across graphs to reduce the domain gap, which is solved with a novel Bipartite Graph Matching adaptor (BGM). In a nutshell, we utilize graph nodes to establish semantic-aware node affinity and leverage graph edges as quadratic constraints in a structure-aware matching loss, achieving fine-grained adaptation with a node-to-node graph matching. Extensive experiments verify that SIGMA outperforms existing works significantly. Our code is available at https://github.com/CityU-AIM-Group/SIGMA.

SIGMA: Semantic-complete Graph Matching for Domain Adaptive Object Detection

Trident-YOLO: Improving the precision and speed of mobile device object detection

Existing approaches for unsupervised domain adaptive object detection perform feature alignment via adversarial training. While these methods achieve reasonable improvements in performance, they typically perform category-agnostic domain alignment, thereby resulting in negative transfer of features. To overcome this issue, in this work, we attempt to incorporate category information into the domain adaptation process by proposing Memory Guided Attention for Category-Aware Domain Adaptation (MeGA-CDA). The proposed method consists of employing category-wise discriminators to ensure category-aware feature alignment for learning domain-invariant discriminative features. However, since the category information is not available for the target samples, we propose to generate memory-guided category-specific attention maps which are then used to route the features appropriately to the corresponding category discriminator. The proposed method is evaluated on several benchmark datasets and is shown to outperform existing approaches.

/pdf/mega-cda-memory-guided-attention-for-category-aware-2xhkil25vy.pdf

MeGA-CDA: Memory Guided Attention for Category-Aware Unsupervised Domain Adaptive Object Detection

In image fusion, images obtained from different sensors are fused to generate a single image with enhanced information. In recent years, state-of-the-art methods have adopted Convolution Neural Networks (CNNs) to encode meaningful features for image fusion. Specifically, CNN-based methods perform image fusion by fusing local features. However, they do not consider long-range dependencies that are present in the image. Transformer-based models are designed to overcome this by modeling the long-range dependencies with the help of self-attention mechanism. This motivates us to propose a novel Image Fusion Transformer (IFT) where we develop a transformer-based multi-scale fusion strategy that attends to both local and long-range information (or global context). The proposed method follows a two-stage training approach. In the first stage, we train an auto-encoder to extract deep features at multiple scales. In the second stage, multi-scale features are fused using a Spatio-Transformer (ST) fusion strategy. The ST fusion blocks are comprised of a CNN and a transformer branch which capture local and long-range features, respectively. Extensive experiments on multiple benchmark datasets show that the proposed method performs better than many competitive fusion algorithms. Furthermore, we show the effectiveness of the proposed ST fusion strategy with an ablation analysis. The source code is available at: this https URL.

Image Fusion Transformer.

Recent advances in deep learning have led to the development of accurate and efficient models for various computer vision applications such as classification, segmentation, and detection. However, learning highly accurate models relies on the availability of large-scale annotated datasets. Due to this, model performance drops drastically when evaluated on label-scarce datasets having visually distinct images, termed as domain adaptation problem. There is a plethora of works to adapt classification and segmentation models to label-scarce target datasets through unsupervised domain adaptation. Considering that detection is a fundamental task in computer vision, many recent works have focused on developing novel domain adaptive detection techniques. Here, we describe in detail the domain adaptation problem for detection and present an extensive survey of the various methods. Furthermore, we highlight strategies proposed and the associated shortcomings. Subsequently, we identify multiple aspects of the problem that are most promising for future research. We believe that this survey shall be valuable to the pattern recognition experts working in the fields of computer vision, biometrics, medical imaging, and autonomous navigation by introducing them to the problem, and familiarizing them with the current status of the progress while providing promising directions for future research.

Unsupervised Domain Adaption of Object Detectors: A Survey

Object detectors trained on large-scale RGB datasets are being extensively employed in real-world applications. However, these RGB-trained models suffer a performance drop under adverse illumination and lighting conditions. Infrared (IR) cameras are robust under such conditions and can be helpful in real-world applications. Though thermal cameras are widely used for military applications and increasingly for commercial applications, there is a lack of robust algorithms to robustly exploit the thermal imagery due to the limited availability of labeled thermal data. In this work, we aim to enhance the object detection performance in the thermal domain by leveraging the labeled visible domain data in an Unsupervised Domain Adaptation (UDA) setting. We propose an algorithm agnostic meta-learning framework to improve existing UDA methods instead of proposing a new UDA strategy. We achieve this by meta-learning the initial condition of the detector, which facilitates the adaptation process with fine updates without overfitting or getting stuck at local optima. However, meta-learning the initial condition for the detection scenario is computationally heavy due to long and intractable computation graphs. Therefore, we propose an online meta-learning paradigm which performs online updates resulting in a short and tractable computation graph. To this end, we demonstrate the superiority of our method over many baselines in the UDA setting, producing a state-of-the-art thermal detector for the KAIST and DSIAC datasets.

Vibashan Vs

Papers

MeGA-CDA: Memory Guided Attention for Category-Aware Unsupervised Domain Adaptive Object Detection

Image Fusion Transformer.

Unsupervised Domain Adaption of Object Detectors: A Survey

Meta-UDA: Unsupervised Domain Adaptive Thermal Object Detection using Meta-Learning.

MeGA-CDA: Memory Guided Attention for Category-Aware Unsupervised Domain Adaptive Object Detection