SSDA-YOLO: Semi-supervised Domain Adaptive YOLO for Cross-Domain Object Detection

Domain adaptive object detection (DAOD) aims to alleviate transfer performance degradation caused by the cross-domain discrepancy. However, most existing DAOD methods are dominated by computationally intensive two-stage detectors, which are not the first choice for industrial applications. In this paper, we propose a novel semi-supervised domain adaptive YOLO (SSDA-YOLO) based method to improve cross-domain detection performance by integrating the compact one-stage detector YOLOv5 with domain adaptation. Specifically, we adapt the knowledge distillation framework with the Mean Teacher model to assist the student model in obtaining instance-level features of the unlabeled target domain. We also utilize the scene style transfer to cross-generate pseudo images in different domains for remedying image-level differences. In addition, an intuitive consistency loss is proposed to further align cross-domain predictions. We evaluate our proposed SSDA-YOLO on public benchmarks including PascalVOC, Clipart1k, Cityscapes, and Foggy Cityscapes. Moreover, to verify its generalization, we conduct experiments on yawning detection datasets collected from various classrooms. The results show considerable improvements of our method in these DAOD tasks. Our code is available on \url{https://github.com/hnuzhy/SSDA-YOLO}.