Attention-based domain adaptation for single-stage detectors

While domain adaptation has been used to improve the performance of object detectors when the training and test data follow different distributions, previous work has mostly focused on two-stage detectors. This is because their use of region proposals makes it possible to perform local adaptation, which has been shown to significantly improve the adaptation effectiveness. Here, by contrast, we target single-stage architectures, which are better suited to resource-constrained detection than two-stage ones but do not provide region proposals. To nonetheless benefit from the strength of local adaptation, we introduce an attention mechanism that lets us identify the important regions on which adaptation should focus. Our method gradually adapts the features from global, image level to local, instance level. Our approach is generic and can be integrated into any Single-Shot Detector. We demonstrate this on standard benchmark datasets by applying it to both the single-shot detector (SSD) and a recent variant of the You Only Look Once detector (YOLOv5). Furthermore, for equivalent single-stage architectures, our method outperforms the state-of-the-art domain adaptation techniques even though they were designed for specific detectors.