Multiple Adverse Weather Conditions Adaptation for Object Detection via Causal Intervention

Most state-of-the-art object detection methods have achieved impressive perfomrace on several public benchmarks, which are trained with high definition images. However, existing detectors are often sensitive to the visual variations and out-of-distribution data due to the domain gap caused by various confounders, e.g. the adverse weathre conditions. To bridge the gap, previous methods have been mainly exploring domain alignment, which requires to collect an amount of domain-specific training samples. In this paper, we introduce a novel domain adaptation model to discover a weather condition invariant feature representation. Specifically, we first employ a memory network to develop a confounder dictionary, which stores prototypes of object features under various scenarios. To guarantee the representativeness of each prototype in the dictionary, a dynamic item extraction strategy is used to update the memory dictionary. After that, we introduce a causal intervention reasoning module to explore the invariant representation of a specific object under different weather conditions. Finally, a categorical consistency regularization is used to constrain the similarities between categories in order to automatically search for the aligned instances among distinct domains. Experiments are conducted on several public benchmarks (RTTS, Foggy-Cityscapes, RID, and BDD 100K) with state-of-the-art performance achieved under multiple weather conditions.