Generalized UAV Object Detection via Frequency Domain Disentanglement

Kunyu Wang, Xueyang Fu, Yukun Huang, Chengzhi Cao, Gege Shi, Zheng-Jun Zha; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2023, pp. 1064-1073

When deploying the Unmanned Aerial Vehicles object detection (UAV-OD) network to complex and unseen real-world scenarios, the generalization ability is usually reduced due to the domain shift. To address this issue, this paper proposes a novel frequency domain disentanglement method to improve the UAV-OD generalization. Specifically, we first verified that the spectrum of different bands in the image has different effects to the UAV-OD generalization. Based on this conclusion, we design two learnable filters to extract domain-invariant spectrum and domain-specific spectrum, respectively. The former can be used to train the UAV-OD network and improve its capacity for generalization. In addition, we design a new instance-level contrastive loss to guide the network training. This loss enables the network to concentrate on extracting domain-invariant spectrum and domain-specific spectrum, so as to achieve better disentangling results. Experimental results on three unseen target domains demonstrate that our method has better generalization ability than both the baseline method and state-of-the-art methods.