TogetherNet: Bridging Image Restoration and Object Detection Together via Dynamic Enhancement Learning
This work addresses the challenge of poor generalization of object detectors in adverse weather for applications like autonomous driving, but it is incremental as it builds on existing multi-task joint learning methods.
The paper tackles the problem of object detection in adverse weather conditions by proposing TogetherNet, a unified detection paradigm that combines image restoration and object detection through dynamic enhancement learning, outperforming state-of-the-art approaches by a large margin on synthetic and real-world datasets.
Adverse weather conditions such as haze, rain, and snow often impair the quality of captured images, causing detection networks trained on normal images to generalize poorly in these scenarios. In this paper, we raise an intriguing question - if the combination of image restoration and object detection, can boost the performance of cutting-edge detectors in adverse weather conditions. To answer it, we propose an effective yet unified detection paradigm that bridges these two subtasks together via dynamic enhancement learning to discern objects in adverse weather conditions, called TogetherNet. Different from existing efforts that intuitively apply image dehazing/deraining as a pre-processing step, TogetherNet considers a multi-task joint learning problem. Following the joint learning scheme, clean features produced by the restoration network can be shared to learn better object detection in the detection network, thus helping TogetherNet enhance the detection capacity in adverse weather conditions. Besides the joint learning architecture, we design a new Dynamic Transformer Feature Enhancement module to improve the feature extraction and representation capabilities of TogetherNet. Extensive experiments on both synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate that our TogetherNet outperforms the state-of-the-art detection approaches by a large margin both quantitatively and qualitatively. Source code is available at https://github.com/yz-wang/TogetherNet.