Foreground-focused domain adapt on for object detection

Object detectors suffer from accuracy loss caused by domain shift from a source to a target domain. Unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) approaches mitigate this loss by training with unlabeled target domain images. A popular processing pipeline applies adversarial training that aligns the distributions of the features from the two domains. We advocate that aligning the full image level features is not ideal for UDA object detection due to the presence of varied background areas during inference. Thus, we propose a novel foreground-focused domain adaptation (FFDA) framework which mines the loss of the domain discriminators to concentrate on the backpropagation of foreground loss. We obtain mining masks by collecting target predictions and source labels to outline foreground regions, and apply the masks to image and instance level domain discrim-inators to allow backpropagation only on the mined regions. By reinforcing this foreground-focused adaptation throughout multiple layers in the detector model, we gain a signilicant accuracy boost on the target domain prediction. Compared to previous methods, our method reaches the new state-of-the-art accuracy on adapting Cityscape to Foggy Cityscape dataset and demonstrates competitive accuracy on other datasets that include various scenarios for autonomous driving applications.