In recent years, object detection has shown impressive results using supervised deep learning, but it remains challenging in a cross-domain environment. The variations of illumination, style, scale, and appearance in different domains can seriously affect the performance of detection models. Previous works use adversarial training to align global features across the domain shift and to achieve image information transfer. However, such methods do not effectively match the distribution of local features, resulting in limited improvement in cross-domain object detection. To solve this problem, we propose a multi-level domain adaptive model to simultaneously align the distributions of local-level features and global-level features. We evaluate our method with multiple experiments, including adverse weather adaptation, synthetic data adaptation, and cross camera adaptation. In most object categories, the proposed method achieves superior performance against state-of-the-art techniques, which demonstrates the effectiveness and robustness of our method.
Unsupervised learning with generative adversarial networks (GANs) has proven hugely successful. Regular GANs hypothesize the discriminator as a classifier with the sigmoid cross entropy loss function. However, we found that this loss function may lead to the vanishing gradients problem during the learning process. To overcome such a problem, we propose in this paper the Least Squares Generative Adversarial Networks (LSGANs) which adopt the least squares loss function for the discriminator. We show that minimizing the objective function of LSGAN yields minimizing the Pearson X2 divergence. There are two benefits of LSGANs over regular GANs. First, LSGANs are able to generate higher quality images than regular GANs. Second, LSGANs perform more stable during the learning process. We evaluate LSGANs on LSUN and CIFAR-10 datasets and the experimental results show that the images generated by LSGANs are of better quality than the ones generated by regular GANs. We also conduct two comparison experiments between LSGANs and regular GANs to illustrate the stability of LSGANs. We introduce a layer-wise unsupervised domain adaptation approach for semantic segmentation. Instead of merely matching the output distributions of the source and target domains, our approach aligns the distributions of activations of intermediate layers. This scheme exhibits two key advantages. First, matching across intermediate layers introduces more constraints for training the network in the target domain, making the optimization problem better conditioned. Second, the matched activations at each layer provide similar inputs to the next layer for both training and adaptation, and thus alleviate covariate shift. We use a Generative Adversarial Network (or GAN) to align activation distributions. Experimental results show that our approach achieves state-of-the-art results on a variety of popular domain adaptation tasks, including (1) from GTA to Cityscapes for semantic segmentation, (2) from SYNTHIA to Cityscapes for semantic segmentation, and (3) adaptations on USPS and MNIST for image classification (The website of this paper is https: rsents.github.io dam.html).