Cross-pollination of knowledge for object detection in domain adaptation for industrial automation

Abstract Artificial Intelligence is revolutionizing industries by enhancing efficiency through real-time Object Detection (OD) applications. Utilizing advanced computer vision techniques, OD systems automate processes, analyze complex visual data, and facilitate data-driven decisions, thus increasing productivity. Domain Adaptation for OD has recently gained prominence for its ability to recognize target objects without annotations. Innovative approaches that merge traditional cross-disciplinary domain modeling with cutting-edge deep learning have become essential in addressing complex AI challenges in real-time scenarios. Unlike traditional methods, this study proposes a novel, effective Cross-Pollination of Knowledge (CPK) strategy for domain adaptation inspired by botanical processes. The CPK approach involves merging target samples with source samples at the input stage. By incorporating a random and unique selection of a few target samples, the merging process enhances object detection results efficiently in domain adaptation, supporting detectors in aligning and generalizing features with the source domain. Additionally, this work presents the new Planeat digit recognition dataset, which includes 231 images. To ensure robust comparison, we employ a self-supervised Domain Adaptation (UDA) method that simultaneously trains target and source domains using unsupervised techniques. UDA method leverages target data to identify high-confidence regions, which are then cropped and augmented, adapting UDA for effective OD. The proposed CPK approach significantly outperforms existing UDA techniques, improving mean Average Precision (mAP) by 10.9% through rigorous testing on five diverse datasets across different conditions- cross-weather, cross-camera, and synthetic-to-real. Our code is publicly available https://github.com/anwaar0/CPK-Object-Detection