Knowledge Mining and Transferring for Domain Adaptive Object Detection

With the thriving of deep learning, CNN-based object detectors have made great progress in the past decade. However, the domain gap between training and testing data leads to a prominent performance degradation and thus hinders their application in the real world. To alleviate this problem, Knowledge Transfer Network (KTNet) is proposed as a new paradigm for domain adaption. Specifically, KT-Net is constructed on a base detector with intrinsic knowledge mining and relational knowledge constraints. First, we design a foreground/background classifier shared by source domain and target domain to extract the common attribute knowledge of objects in different scenarios. Second, we model the relational knowledge graph and explicitly constrain the consistency of category correlation under source domain, target domain, as well as cross-domain conditions. As a result, the detector is guided to learn object-related and domain-independent representation. Extensive experiments and visualizations confirm that transferring object-specific knowledge can yield notable performance gains. The proposed KTNet achieves state-of-the-art results on three cross-domain detection benchmarks.