Domain Adaptive Object Detection for Autonomous Driving Under Foggy Weather

Jinlong Li, Runsheng Xu, Jin Ma, Qin Zou, Jiaqi Ma, Hongkai Yu; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Winter Conference on Applications of Computer Vision (WACV), 2023, pp. 612-622

Most object detection methods for autonomous driving usually assume a onsistent feature distribution between training and testing data, which is not always the case when weathers differ significantly. The object detection model trained under clear weather might be not effective enough on the foggy weather because of the domain gap. This paper proposes a novel domain adaptive object detection framework for autonomous driving under foggy weather. Our method leverages both image-level and object-level adaptation to diminish the domain discrepancy in image style and object appearance. To further enhance the model's capabilities under challenging samples, we also come up with a new adversarial gradient reversal layer to perform adversarial mining for the hard examples together with domain adaptation. Moreover, we propose to generate an auxiliary domain by data augmentation to enforce a new domain-level metric regularization. Experimental results on public benchmarks show the effectiveness and accuracy of the proposed method.