D3T: Distinctive Dual-Domain Teacher Zigzagging Across RGB-Thermal Gap for Domain-Adaptive Object Detection
Authors: Dinh Phat Do, Taehoon Kim, Jaemin Na, Jiwon Kim, Keonho Lee, Kyunghwan Cho, Wonjun Hwang

Domain adaptation for object detection typically entails transferring knowledge from one visible domain to another visible domain. However there are limited studies on adapting from the visible to the thermal domain because the domain gap between the visible and thermal domains is much larger than expected and traditional domain adaptation can not successfully facilitate learning in this situation. To overcome this challenge we propose a Distinctive Dual-Domain Teacher (D3T) framework that employs distinct training paradigms for each domain. Specifically we segregate the source and target training sets for building dual-teachers and successively deploy exponential moving average to the student model to individual teachers of each domain. The framework further incorporates a zigzag learning method between dual teachers facilitating a gradual transition from the visible to thermal domains during training. We validate the superiority of our method through newly designed experimental protocols with well-known thermal datasets i.e. FLIR and KAIST. Source code is available at https://github.com/EdwardDo69/D3T.