Abstract: Domain adaptation addresses the problem of accuracy drop that a classifier may suffer when the training data (source domain) and the testing data (target domain) are drawn from different distributions. In this work, we focus on domain adaptation for structured SVM (SSVM). We propose a cost-sensitive domain adaptation method for SSVM, namely COSS-SSVM. In particular, during the re-training of an adapted classifier based on target and source data, the idea that we explore consists in introducing a non-zero cost even for correctly classified source domain samples. Eventually, we aim to learn a more targetoriented classifier by not rewarding (zero loss) properly classified source-domain training samples. We assess the effectiveness of COSS-SSVM on multi-category object recognition.

Abstract: Nowadays, classifiers play a core role in many computer vision tasks. The underlying assumption for learning classifiers is that the training set and the deployment environment (testing) follow the same probability distribution regarding the features used by the classifiers. However, in practice, there are different reasons that can break this constancy assumption. Accordingly, reusing existing classifiers by adapting them from the previous training environment (source domain) to the new testing one (target domain)
is an approach with increasing acceptance in the computer vision community. In this paper we focus on the domain adaptation of deformable part-based models (DPMs) for object detection. In particular, we focus on a relatively unexplored scenario, i.e. incremental domain adaptation for object detection assuming weak-labeling. Therefore, our algorithm is ready to improve existing source-oriented DPM-based detectors as soon as a little amount of labeled target-domain training data is available, and keeps improving as more of such data arrives in a continuous fashion. For achieving this, we follow a multiple
instance learning (MIL) paradigm that operates in an incremental per-image basis. As proof of concept, we address the challenging scenario of adapting a DPM-based pedestrian detector trained with synthetic pedestrians to operate in real-world scenarios. The obtained results show that our incremental adaptive models obtain equally good accuracy results as the batch learned models, while being more flexible for handling continuously arriving target-domain data.

Abstract: Autonomous driving has harsh requirements of small model size and energy efficiency, in order to enable the embedded system to achieve real-time on-board object detection. Recent deep convolutional neural network based object detectors have achieved state-of-the-art accuracy. However, such models are trained with numerous parameters and their high computational costs and large storage prohibit the deployment to memory and computation resource limited systems. Low-precision neural networks are popular techniques for reducing the computation requirements and memory footprint. Among them, binary weight neural network (BWN) is the extreme case which quantizes the float-point into just bit. BWNs are difficult to train and suffer from accuracy deprecation due to the extreme low-bit representation. To address this problem, we propose a knowledge transfer (KT) method to aid the training of BWN using a full-precision teacher network. We built DarkNet-and MobileNet-based binary weight YOLO-v2 detectors and conduct experiments on KITTI benchmark for car, pedestrian and cyclist detection. The experimental results show that the proposed method maintains high detection accuracy while reducing the model size of DarkNet-YOLO from 257 MB to 8.8 MB and MobileNet-YOLO from 193 MB to 7.9 MB.

Abstract: We propose an online domain adaptation method for the deformable part-based model (DPM). The online domain adaptation is based on a two-level hierarchical adaptation tree, which consists of instance detectors in the leaf nodes and a category detector at the root node. Moreover, combined with a multiple object tracking procedure (MOT), our proposal neither requires target-domain annotated data nor revisiting the source-domain data for performing the source-to-target domain adaptation of the DPM. From a practical point of view this means that, given a source-domain DPM and new video for training on a new domain without object annotations, our procedure outputs a new DPM adapted to the domain represented by the video. As proof-of-concept we apply our proposal to the challenging task of pedestrian detection. In this case, each instance detector is an exemplar classifier trained online with only one pedestrian per frame. The pedestrian instances are collected by MOT and the hierarchical model is constructed dynamically according to the pedestrian trajectories. Our experimental results show that the adapted detector achieves the accuracy of recent supervised domain adaptation methods (i.e., requiring manually annotated targetdomain data), and improves the source detector more than 10 percentage points.

Abstract: Detecting pedestrians in images is a key functionality to avoid vehicle-to-pedestrian collisions. The most promising detectors rely on appearance-based pedestrian classifiers trained with labelled samples. This paper addresses the following question: can a pedestrian appearance model learnt in virtual scenarios work successfully for pedestrian detection in real images? (Fig. 1). Our experiments suggest a positive answer, which is a new and relevant conclusion for research in pedestrian detection. More specifically, we record training sequences in virtual scenarios and then appearance-based pedestrian classifiers are learnt using HOG and linear SVM. We test such classifiers in a publicly available dataset provided by Daimler AG for pedestrian detection benchmarking. This dataset contains real world images acquired from a moving car. The obtained result is compared with the one given by a classifier learnt using samples coming from real images. The comparison reveals that, although virtual samples were not specially selected, both virtual and real based training give rise to classifiers of similar performance.