FIT: Frequency-based Image Translation for Domain Adaptive Object Detection

Abstract

Domain adaptive object detection (DAOD) aims to adapt the detector from a labelled source domain to an unlabelled target domain. In recent years, DAOD has attracted massive attention since it can alleviate performance degradation due to the large shift of data distributions in the wild. To align distributions between domains, adversarial learning is widely used in existing DAOD methods. However, the decision boundary for the adversarial domain discriminator may be inaccurate, causing the model biased towards the source domain. To alleviate this bias, we propose a novel Frequency-based Image Translation (FIT) framework for DAOD. First, by keeping domain-invariant frequency components and swapping domain-specific ones, we conduct image translation to reduce domain shift at the input level. Second, hierarchical adversarial feature learning is utilized to further mitigate the domain gap at the feature level. Finally, we design a joint loss to train the entire network in an end-to-end manner without extra training to obtain translated images. Extensive experiments on three challenging DAOD benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of our method.