In this paper, we propose subspace alignment based domain adaptation of the state of the art RCNN based object detector. The aim is to be able to achieve high quality object detection in novel, real world target scenarios without requiring labels from the target domain. While, unsupervised domain adaptation has been studied in the case of object classification, for object detection it has been relatively unexplored. In subspace based domain adaptation for objects, we need access to source and target subspaces for the bounding box features. The absence of supervision (labels and bounding boxes are absent) makes the task challenging. In this paper, we show that we can still adapt sub- spaces that are localized to the object by obtaining detections from the RCNN detector trained on source and applied on target. Then we form localized subspaces from the detections and show that subspace alignment based adaptation between these subspaces yields improved object detection. This evaluation is done by considering challenging real world datasets of PASCAL VOC as source and validation set of Microsoft COCO dataset as target for various categories.
@cite_8: Domain adaptation is an active, emerging research area that attemptsto address the changes in data distribution across training and testingdatasets. With the availability of a multitude of image acquisition sensors,variations due to illumination, and viewpoint among others, computervision applications present a very natural test bed for evaluatingdomain adaptation methods. In this monograph, we provide a comprehensiveoverview of domain adaptation solutions for visual recognitionproblems. By starting with the problem description and illustrations,we discuss three adaptation scenarios namely, i unsupervised adaptationwhere the "source domain" training data is partially labeledand the "target domain" test data is unlabeled, ii semi-supervisedadaptation where the target domain also has partial labels, and iiimulti-domain heterogeneous adaptation which studies the previous twosettings with the source and or target having more than one domain,and accounts for cases where the features used to represent the datain each domain are different. For all these topics we discuss existingadaptation techniques in the literature, which are motivated by theprinciples of max-margin discriminative learning, manifold learning,sparse coding, as well as low-rank representations. These techniqueshave shown improved performance on a variety of applications suchas object recognition, face recognition, activity analysis, concept classification,and person detection. We then conclude by analyzing thechallenges posed by the realm of "big visual data", in terms of thegeneralization ability of adaptation algorithms to unconstrained dataacquisition as well as issues related to their computational tractability,and draw parallels with the efforts from vision community on imagetransformation models, and invariant descriptors so as to facilitate improvedunderstanding of vision problems under uncertainty.
The task of visual domain adaptation for object classification has been studied in unsupervised and semi-supervised settings. In this section we briefly survey only the domain adaptation techniques that are related to the present work. A recent extended report @cite_8 by Gopalan surveys domain adaptation techniques for visual recognition.