CAT: Exploiting Inter-Class Dynamics for Domain Adaptive Object Detection

Mikhail Kennerley, Jian-Gang Wang, Bharadwaj Veeravalli, Robby T. Tan; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2024, pp. 16541-16550

Domain adaptive object detection aims to adapt detection models to domains where annotated data is unavailable. Existing methods have been proposed to address the domain gap using the semi-supervised student-teacher framework. However a fundamental issue arises from the class imbalance in the labelled training set which can result in inaccurate pseudo-labels. The relationship between classes especially where one class is a majority and the other minority has a large impact on class bias. We propose Class-Aware Teacher (CAT) to address the class bias issue in the domain adaptation setting. In our work we approximate the class relationships with our Inter-Class Relation module (ICRm) and exploit it to reduce the bias within the model. In this way we are able to apply augmentations to highly related classes both inter- and intra-domain to boost the performance of minority classes while having minimal impact on majority classes. We further reduce the bias by implementing a class-relation weight to our classification loss. Experiments conducted on various datasets and ablation studies show that our method is able to address the class bias in the domain adaptation setting. On the Cityscapes ? Foggy Cityscapes dataset we attained a 52.5 mAP a substantial improvement over the 51.2 mAP achieved by the state-of-the-art method.