Cloud Object Detector Adaptation by Integrating Different Source Knowledge

Shuaifeng Li, Mao Ye, Lihua Zhou, Nianxin Li, Siying Xiao, Song Tang, Xiatian Zhu

Keywords: Object detection, Cloud model, Domain adaptation

TL;DR: We propose to explore cloud object detector adaptation by integrating different source knowledge in a self-promotion way.

Abstract: We propose to explore an interesting and promising problem, Cloud Object Detector Adaptation (CODA), where the target domain leverages detections provided by a large cloud model to build a target detector. Despite with powerful generalization capability, the cloud model still cannot achieve error-free detection in a specific target domain. In this work, we present a novel Cloud Object detector adaptation method by Integrating different source kNowledge (COIN). The key idea is to incorporate a public vision-language model (CLIP) to distill positive knowledge while refining negative knowledge for adaptation by self-promotion gradient direction alignment. To that end, knowledge dissemination, separation, and distillation are carried out successively. Knowledge dissemination combines knowledge from cloud detector and CLIP model to initialize a target detector and a CLIP detector in target domain. By matching CLIP detector with the cloud detector, knowledge separation categorizes detections into three parts: consistent, inconsistent and private detections such that divide-and-conquer strategy can be used for knowledge distillation. Consistent and private detections are directly used to train target detector; while inconsistent detections are fused based on a consistent knowledge generation network, which is trained by aligning the gradient direction of inconsistent detections to that of consistent detections, because it provides a direction toward an optimal target detector. Experiment results demonstrate that the proposed COIN method achieves the state-of-the-art performance.

Primary Area: Machine vision

Submission Number: 2802