Pretrained model or training from scratch for object detection?
I have a dataset composed of 10k-15k pictures for supervised object detection which is very different from Imagenet or Coco (pictures are much darker and represent completely different things, industrial related).
The model currently used is a FasterRCNN which extracts features with a Resnet used as a backbone.
Could train the backbone of the model from scratch in one stage and then train the whole network in another stage be beneficial for the task, instead of loading the network pretrained on Coco and then retraining all the layers of the whole network in a single stage?

From my experience, here are some important points:

your train set is not big enough to train the detector from scratch (though depends on network configuration, fasterrcnn+resnet18 can work). Better to use a pre-trained network on the imagenet;
the domain the network was pre-trained on is not really that important. The network, especially the big one, need to learn all those arches, circles, and other primitive figures in order to use the knowledge for detecting more complex objects;
the brightness of your train images can be important but is not something to stop you from using a pre-trained network;
training from scratch requires much more epochs and much more data. The longer the training is the more complex should be your LR control algorithm. At a minimum, it should not be constant and change the LR based on the cumulative loss. and the initial settings depend on multiple factors, such as network size, augmentations, and the number of epochs;
I played a lot with fasterrcnn+resnet (various number of layers) and the other networks. I recommend you to use maskcnn instead of fasterrcnn. Just command it not to use the masks and not to do the segmentation. I don't know why but it gives much better results.
don't spend your time on mobilenet, with your train set size you will not be able to train it with some reasonable AP and AR. Start with maskrcnn+resnet18 backbone.

