Bottom-up and Layerwise Domain Adaptation for Pedestrian Detection in Thermal Images

Pedestrian detection is a canonical problem for safety and security applications, and it remains a challenging problem due to the highly variable lighting conditions in which pedestrians must be detected. This article investigates several domain adaptation approaches to adapt RGB-trained detectors to the thermal domain. Building on our earlier work on domain adaptation for privacy-preserving pedestrian detection, we conducted an extensive experimental evaluation comparing top-down and bottom-up domain adaptation and also propose two new bottom-up domain adaptation strategies. For top-down domain adaptation, we leverage a detector pre-trained on RGB imagery and efficiently adapt it to perform pedestrian detection in the thermal domain. Our bottom-up domain adaptation approaches include two steps: first, training an adapter segment corresponding to initial layers of the RGB-trained detector adapts to the new input distribution; then, we reconnect the adapter segment to the original RGB-trained detector for final adaptation with a top-down loss. To the best of our knowledge, our bottom-up domain adaptation approaches outperform the best-performing single-modality pedestrian detection results on KAIST and outperform the state of the art on FLIR.