Cross-domain object detection using unsupervised image translation

Unsupervised domain adaptation for object detection addresses the adaption of detectors trained in a source domain to work accurately in an unseen target domain. Recently, methods approaching the alignment of the intermediate features proven to be promising, achieving state-of-the-art results. However, these methods are laborious to implement and hard to interpret. Although promising, there is still room for improvements to close the performance gap toward the upper-bound (when training with the target data). In this work, we propose a method to generate an artificial dataset in the target domain to train an object detector. We employed two unsupervised image translators (CycleGAN and an AdaIN-based model) using only annotated data from the source domain and non-annotated data from the target domain. Our key contributions are the proposal of a less complex yet more effective method that also has an improved interpretability. Results on real-world scenarios for autonomous driving show significant improvements, outperforming state-of-the-art methods in most cases, further closing the gap toward the upper-bound.

Automated summary

Unsupervised domain adaptation for object detection focuses on transferring detectors from a source domain to an unseen target domain, with recent methods showing promise by aligning intermediate features. This study proposes a method to generate artificial data in the target domain using unsupervised image translators, leading to significant improvements in real-world scenarios for autonomous driving and outperforming existing methods in most cases. The proposed approach offers a less complex yet more effective solution with improved interpretability.