Domain Adaptive Urban Garbage Detection Based on Attention and Confidence Fusion

To overcome the challenges posed by limited garbage datasets and the laborious nature of data labeling in urban garbage object detection, we propose an innovative unsupervised domain adaptation approach to detecting garbage objects in urban aerial images. The proposed method leverages a detector, initially trained on source domain images, to generate pseudo-labels for target domain images. By employing an attention and confidence fusion strategy, images from both source and target domains can be seamlessly integrated, thereby enabling the detector to incrementally adapt to target domain scenarios while preserving its detection efficacy in the source domain. This approach mitigates the performance degradation caused by domain discrepancies, significantly enhancing the model’s adaptability. The proposed method was validated on a self-constructed urban garbage dataset. Experimental results demonstrate its superior performance over baseline models. Furthermore, we extended the proposed mixing method to other typical scenarios and conducted comprehensive experiments on four well-known public datasets: Cityscapes, KITTI, Sim10k, and Foggy Cityscapes. The result shows that the proposed method exhibits remarkable effectiveness and adaptability across diverse datasets.