Object detection typically assumes that training and test data are drawn from an identical distribution, which, however, does not always hold in practice. Such a distribution mismatch will lead to a significant performance drop. In this work, we aim to improve the cross-domain robustness of object detection. We tackle the domain shift on two levels: 1) the image-level shift, such as image style, illumination, etc., and 2) the instance-level shift, such as object appearance, size, etc. We build our approach based on the recent state-of-the-art Faster R-CNN model, and design two domain adaptation components, on image level and instance level, to reduce the domain discrepancy. The two domain adaptation components are based on @math -divergence theory, and are implemented by learning a domain classifier in adversarial training manner. The domain classifiers on different levels are further reinforced with a consistency regularization to learn a domain-invariant region proposal network (RPN) in the Faster R-CNN model. We evaluate our newly proposed approach using multiple datasets including Cityscapes, KITTI, SIM10K, etc. The results demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed approach for robust object detection in various domain shift scenarios.
Typical object detectors trained on images perform poorly on video, as there is a clear distinction in domain between the two types of data. In this paper, we tackle the problem of adapting object detectors learned from images to work well on videos. We treat the problem as one of unsupervised domain adaptation, in which we are given labeled data from the source domain (image), but only unlabeled data from the target domain (video). Our approach, self-paced domain adaptation, seeks to iteratively adapt the detector by re-training the detector with automatically discovered target domain examples, starting with the easiest first. At each iteration, the algorithm adapts by considering an increased number of target domain examples, and a decreased number of source domain examples. To discover target domain examples from the vast amount of video data, we introduce a simple, robust approach that scores trajectory tracks instead of bounding boxes. We also show how rich and expressive features specific to the target domain can be incorporated under the same framework. We show promising results on the 2011 TRECVID Multimedia Event Detection [1] and LabelMe Video [2] datasets that illustrate the benefit of our approach to adapt object detectors to video. During the last half decade, convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have triumphed over semantic segmentation, which is a core task of various emerging industrial applications such as autonomous driving and medical imaging. However, to train CNNs requires a huge amount of data, which is difficult to collect and laborious to annotate. Recent advances in computer graphics make it possible to train CNN models on photo-realistic synthetic data with computer-generated annotations. Despite this, the domain mismatch between the real images and the synthetic data significantly decreases the models’ performance. Hence we propose a curriculum-style learning approach to minimize the domain gap in semantic segmentation. The curriculum domain adaptation solves easy tasks first in order to infer some necessary properties about the target domain; in particular, the first task is to learn global label distributions over images and local distributions over landmark superpixels. These are easy to estimate because images of urban traffic scenes have strong idiosyncrasies (e.g., the size and spatial relations of buildings, streets, cars, etc.). We then train the segmentation network in such a way that the network predictions in the target domain follow those inferred properties. In experiments, our method significantly outperforms the baselines as well as the only known existing approach to the same problem. It has been an underlying assumption behind most of the machine learning algorithms that training and test instances should be sampled from a similar distribution. The difference in resolution, difference in view points, clutter and background are the main reasons which can cause the problem of domain shift. Indeed, the problem is particularly pertinent to the computer vision community due to our reliance on ‘standard’ challenging datasets. However most of the work in this field revolves around adapting a classifier for the task of object recognition or classification and not much effort has been put to adapt an object detector. In this paper, we propose subspace alignment based domain adaptation of the state of the art RCNN based object detector [2]. In subspace based domain adaptation for objects, we need access to source and target subspaces for the bounding box features . The absence of supervision (labels and bounding boxes are absent) makes the task challenging. The proposed approach builds upon the previously proposed subspace alignment based method [1] for visual domain adaptation to adapt the RCNN detector [2]. While fine-grained object recognition is an important problem in computer vision, current models are unlikely to accurately classify objects in the wild. These fully supervised models need additional annotated images to classify objects in every new scenario, a task that is infeasible. However, sources such as e-commerce websites and field guides provide annotated images for many classes. In this work, we study fine-grained domain adaptation as a step towards overcoming the dataset shift between easily acquired annotated images and the real world. Adaptation has not been studied in the fine-grained setting where annotations such as attributes could be used to increase performance. Our work uses an attribute based multi-task adaptation loss to increase accuracy from a baseline of 4.1 to 19.1 in the semi-supervised adaptation case. Prior do- main adaptation works have been benchmarked on small datasets such as [46] with a total of 795 images for some domains, or simplistic datasets such as [41] consisting of digits. We perform experiments on a subset of a new challenging fine-grained dataset consisting of 1,095,021 images of 2, 657 car categories drawn from e-commerce web- sites and Google Street View. The most successful 2D object detection methods require a large number of images annotated with object bounding boxes to be collected for training. We present an alternative approach that trains on virtual data rendered from 3D models, avoiding the need for manual labeling. Growing demand for virtual reality applications is quickly bringing about an abundance of available 3D models for a large variety of object categories. While mainstream use of 3D models in vision has focused on predicting the 3D pose of objects, we investigate the use of such freely available 3D models for multicategory 2D object detection. To address the issue of dataset bias that arises from training on virtual data and testing on real images, we propose a simple and fast adaptation approach based on decorrelated features. We also compare two kinds of virtual data, one rendered with real-image textures and one without. Evaluation on a benchmark domain adaptation dataset demonstrates that our method performs comparably to existing methods trained on large-scale real image domains.  Crowdsourced 3D CAD models are easily accessible online, and can potentially generate an infinite number of training images for almost any object category. We show that augmenting the training data of contemporary Deep Convolutional Neural Net (DCNN) models with such synthetic data can be effective, especially when real training data is limited or not well matched to the target domain. Most freely available CAD models capture 3D shape but are often missing other low level cues, such as realistic object texture, pose, or background. In a detailed analysis, we use synthetic CAD images to probe the ability of DCNN to learn without these cues, with surprising findings. In particular, we show that when the DCNN is fine-tuned on the target detection task, it exhibits a large degree of invariance to missing low-level cues, but, when pretrained on generic ImageNet classification, it learns better when the low-level cues are simulated. We show that our synthetic DCNN training approach significantly outperforms previous methods on the benchmark PASCAL VOC2007 dataset when learning in the few-shot scenario and improves performance in a domain shift scenario on the Office benchmark. The accuracy of object classifiers can significantly drop when the training data (source domain) and the application scenario (target domain) have inherent differences. Therefore, adapting the classifiers to the scenario in which they must operate is of paramount importance. We present novel domain adaptation (DA) methods for object detection. As proof of concept, we focus on adapting the state-of-the-art deformable part-based model (DPM) for pedestrian detection. We introduce an adaptive structural SVM (A-SSVM) that adapts a pre-learned classifier between different domains. By taking into account the inherent structure in feature space (e.g., the parts in a DPM), we propose a structure-aware A-SSVM (SA-SSVM). Neither A-SSVM nor SA-SSVM needs to revisit the source-domain training data to perform the adaptation. Rather, a low number of target-domain training examples (e.g., pedestrians) are used. To address the scenario where there are no target-domain annotated samples, we propose a self-adaptive DPM based on a self-paced learning (SPL) strategy and a Gaussian Process Regression (GPR). Two types of adaptation tasks are assessed: from both synthetic pedestrians and general persons (PASCAL VOC) to pedestrians imaged from an on-board camera. Results show that our proposals avoid accuracy drops as high as 15 points when comparing adapted and non-adapted detectors. Exploiting synthetic data to learn deep models has attracted increasing attention in recent years. However, the intrinsic domain difference between synthetic and real images usually causes a significant performance drop when applying the learned model to real world scenarios. This is mainly due to two reasons: 1) the model overfits to synthetic images, making the convolutional filters incompetent to extract informative representation for real images; 2) there is a distribution difference between synthetic and real data, which is also known as the domain adaptation problem. To this end, we propose a new reality oriented adaptation approach for urban scene semantic segmentation by learning from synthetic data. First, we propose a target guided distillation approach to learn the real image style, which is achieved by training the segmentation model to imitate a pretrained real style model using real images. Second, we further take advantage of the intrinsic spatial structure presented in urban scene images, and propose a spatial-aware adaptation scheme to effectively align the distribution of two domains. These two modules can be readily integrated with existing state-of-the-art semantic segmentation networks to improve their generalizability when adapting from synthetic to real urban scenes. We evaluate the proposed method on Cityscapes dataset by adapting from GTAV and SYNTHIA datasets, where the results demonstrate the effectiveness of our method. We consider the problem of designing a scene-specific pedestrian detector in a scenario where we have zero instances of real pedestrian data (i.e., no labeled real data or unsupervised real data). This scenario may arise when a new surveillance system is installed in a novel location and a scene-specific pedestrian detector must be trained prior to any observations of pedestrians. The key idea of our approach is to infer the potential appearance of pedestrians using geometric scene data and a customizable database of virtual simulations of pedestrian motion. We propose an efficient discriminative learning method that generates a spatially-varying pedestrian appearance model that takes into the account the perspective geometry of the scene. As a result, our method is able to learn a unique pedestrian classifier customized for every possible location in the scene. Our experimental results show that our proposed approach outperforms classical pedestrian detection models and hybrid synthetic-real models. Our results also yield a surprising result, that our method using purely synthetic data is able to outperform models trained on real scene-specific data when data is limited.