Towards Domain Generalization in Object Detection

Abstract: Despite the striking performance achieved by modern detectors when training and test data are sampled from the same or similar distribution, the generalization ability of detectors under unknown distribution shifts remains hardly studied. Recently several works discussed the detectors' adaptation ability to a specific target domain which are not readily applicable in real-world applications since detectors may encounter various environments or situations while pre-collecting all of them before training is inconceivable. In this paper, we study the critical problem, domain generalization in object detection (DGOD), where detectors are trained with source domains and evaluated on unknown target domains. To thoroughly evaluate detectors under unknown distribution shifts, we formulate the DGOD problem and propose a comprehensive evaluation benchmark to fill the vacancy. Moreover, we propose a novel method named Region Aware Proposal reweighTing (RAPT) to eliminate dependence within RoI features. Extensive experiments demonstrate that current DG methods fail to address the DGOD problem and our method outperforms other state-of-the-art counterparts.