Consolidating Separate Degradations Model via Weights Fusion and Distillation

Dinesh Daultani, Hugo Larochelle; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Winter Conference on Applications of Computer Vision (WACV) Workshops, 2024, pp. 440-449

Real-world images prevalently contain different varieties of degradation, such as motion blur and luminance noise. Computer vision recognition models trained on clean images perform poorly on degraded images. Previously, several works have explored how to perform image classification of degraded images while training a single model for each degradation. Nevertheless, it becomes challenging to host several degradation models for each degradation on limited hardware applications and to estimate degradation parameters correctly at the run-time. This work proposes a method for effectively combining several models trained separately on different degradations into a single model to classify images with different types of degradations. Our proposed method is four-fold: (1) train a base model on clean images, (2) fine-tune the base model individually for all given image degradations, (3) perform a fusion of weights given the fine-tuned models for individual degradations, (4) perform fine-tuning on given task using distillation and cross-entropy loss. Our proposed method can outperform previous state-of-the-art methods of pretraining in out-of-distribution generalization based on degradations such as JPEG compression, salt-and-pepper noise, Gaussian blur, and additive white Gaussian noise by 2.5% on CIFAR-100 dataset and by 1.3% on CIFAR-10 dataset. Moreover, our proposed method can handle degradation used for training without any explicit information about degradation at the inference time.