Object Detection in Foggy Scenes by Embedding Depth and Reconstruction into Domain Adaptation

Xin Yang, Michael Bi Mi, Yuan Yuan, Xin Wang, Robby T. Tan; Proceedings of the Asian Conference on Computer Vision (ACCV), 2022, pp. 1093-1108

Most existing domain adaptation (DA) methods align the features based on the domain feature distributions and ignore aspects related to fog, background and target objects, rendering suboptimal performance. In our DA framework, we retain the depth and background information during the domain feature alignment. A consistency loss between the generated depth and fog transmission map is introduced to strengthen the retention of the depth information in the aligned features. To address false object features potentially generated during the DA process, we propose an encoder-decoder framework to reconstruct the fog-free background image. This reconstruction loss also reinforces the encoder, i.e., our DA backbone, to minimize false object features. Moreover, we involve our target data in training both our DA module and our detection module in a semi-supervised manner, so that our detection module is also exposed to the unlabeled target data, the type of data used in the testing stage. Using these ideas, our method significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art method (47.6 mAP against the 44.3 mAP on the Foggy Cityscapes dataset), and obtains the best performance on multiple real-image public datasets.