Exploiting Low-confidence Pseudo-labels for Source-free Object Detection

Abstract: Source-free object detection (SFOD) aims to adapt a source-trained detector to an unlabeled target domain without access to the labeled source data. Current SFOD methods utilize a threshold-based pseudo-label approach in the adaptation phase, which is typically limited to high-confidence pseudo-labels and results in a loss of information. To address this issue, we propose a new approach to take full advantage of pseudo-labels by introducing high and low confidence thresholds. Specifically, the pseudo-labels with confidence scores above the high threshold are used conventionally, while those between the low and high thresholds are exploited using the Low-confidence Pseudo-labels Utilization (LPU) module. The LPU module consists of Proposal Soft Training (PST) and Local Spatial Contrastive Learning (LSCL). PST generates soft labels of proposals for soft training, which can mitigate the label mismatch problem. LSCL exploits the local spatial relationship of proposals to improve the model's ability to differentiate between spatially adjacent proposals, thereby optimizing representational features further. Combining the two components overcomes the challenges faced by traditional methods in utilizing low-confidence pseudo-labels. Extensive experiments on five cross-domain object detection benchmarks demonstrate that our proposed method outperforms the previous SFOD methods, achieving state-of-the-art performance.