Enhancing low-light object detection through domain adaptation and image enhancement
摘要
Object detection, a core task in computer vision, aims to identify and locate objects in images or videos. Convolutional neural network (CNN)-based methods, such as Faster R-CNN, YOLO, and RetinaNet, have achieved excellent performance under ideal conditions but suffer significant performance degradation in low-light environments. This paper proposes a domain adaptation-based method to enhance low-light object detection by reducing the data distribution difference between normal and low-light images. Image enhancement is performed by decomposing the image using the Laplacian pyramid, designing a global enhancement module for low-frequency components, and optimizing high-frequency components through a cross-layer guidance module. In the joint training stage, a multi-scale feature alignment module based on adversarial training is incorporated into the student model to learn domain-invariant features. Extensive experiments on multiple publicly available datasets demonstrate that our proposed algorithm outperforms the state-of-the-art approach by 1% on the BDD100K dataset and by 1.8% on the SHIFT dataset. This study provides an efficient and robust solution for object detection in low-light environments, with significant application value in scenarios such as autonomous driving and video surveillance. The code can be found at https://github.com/yanguo-lucky/ELOD.