PAGen: Phase-guided Amplitude Generation for Domain-adaptive Object Detection

Abstract

Unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) greatly facilitates the deployment of neural networks across diverse environments. However, most state-of-the-art approaches are overly complex, relying on challenging adversarial training strategies, or on elaborate architectural designs with auxiliary models for feature distillation and pseudo-label generation. In this work, we present a simple yet effective UDA method that learns to adapt image styles in the frequency domain to reduce the discrepancy between source and target domains. The proposed approach introduces only a lightweight pre-processing module during training and entirely discards it at inference time, thus incurring no additional computational overhead. We validate our method on domain-adaptive object detection (DAOD) tasks, where ground-truth annotations are easily accessible in source domains (e.g., normal-weather or synthetic conditions) but challenging to obtain in target domains (e.g., adverse weather or low-light scenes). Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves substantial performance gains on multiple benchmarks, highlighting its practicality and effectiveness.