Multi-Prototype Guided Source-Free Domain Adaptive Object Detection for Autonomous Driving

Source-free domain adaptive object detection (source-free DAOD) seeks to adapt a detector pre-trained on a source domain to an unlabeled target domain without requiring access to annotated source domain data. To address challenges posed by domain shifts, current source-free DAOD approaches mainly rely on the self-training paradigm, where pseudo labels are predicted and employed to fine-tune the detector on unlabeled target domain. However, these methods often encounter issues related to intra-class variation, resulting in category-specific biases and noisy pseudo labels. In response, we present an effective Multi-Prototype Guided source-free DAOD method, dubbed MPG, consisting of two key components: multi-prototype guided pseudo labeling (MPPL) and multi-prototype guided consistency regularization (MPCR) modules. In the MPPL module, we construct category-specific multiple prototypes to better represent the category with intra-class variations. Specifically, multiple prototypes with adaptive cluster centroids are introduced for each category to effectively capture the intra-class variations. Through the implementation of the proposed MPPL module, we derive more accurate pseudo labels by assessing the proximity of instance features to multiple category prototypes. In the MPCR module, we introduce multi-level consistency regularization, including prototype-based consistency and prediction consistency, which encourages the model to overlook style perturbations and learn domain-invariant representations. Extensive experiments on five public driving datasets demonstrate that MPG outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods, showcasing its effectiveness in adapting object detectors to target domains.