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In the field of object detection, domain generalisation (DG) aims to ensure robust performance across diverse and unseen target domains by learning the robust domain-invariant features corresponding to the objects of interest across multiple source domains. While there are many approaches established for performing DG for the task of classification, there has been a very little focus on object detection. In this paper, we propose a domain penalisation (DP) framework for the task of object detection, where the data is assumed to be sampled from multiple source domains and tested on completely unseen test domains. We assign penalisation weights to each domain, with the values updated based on the detection networks performance on the respective source domains. By prioritising the domains that needs more attention, our approach effectively balances the training process. We evaluate our solution on the GWHD 2021 dataset, a component of the WiLDS benchmark and we compare against ERM and GroupDRO as these are primarily loss function based. Our extensive experimental results reveals that the proposed approach improves the accuracy by 0.3 percent and 0.5 percent on validation and test out-of-distribution (OOD) sets, respectively for FasterRCNN. We also compare the performance of our approach on FCOS detector and show that our approach improves the baseline OOD performance over the existing approaches by 1.3 percent and 1.4 percent on validation and test sets, respectively. This study underscores the potential of performance based domain penalisation in enhancing the generalisation ability of object detection models across diverse environments.

Deep neural networks (DNNs) have exhibited remarkable performance across various tasks, yet their susceptibility to spurious correlations poses a significant challenge for out-of-distribution (OOD) generalization. Spurious correlations refer to erroneous associations in data that do not reflect true underlying relationships but are instead artifacts of dataset characteristics or biases. These correlations can lead DNNs to learn patterns that are not robust across diverse datasets or real-world scenarios, hampering their ability to generalize beyond training data. In this paper, we propose an autoencoder-based approach to analyze the nature of spurious correlations that exist in the Global Wheat Head Detection (GWHD) 2021 dataset. We then use inpainting followed by Weighted Boxes Fusion (WBF) to achieve a 2% increase in the Average Domain Accuracy (ADA) over the YOLOv5 baseline and consistently show that our approach has the ability to suppress some of the spurious correlations in the GWHD 2021 dataset. The key advantage of our approach is that it is more suitable in scenarios where there is limited scope to adapt or fine-tune the trained model in unseen test environments.

Accurately quantifying and removing submerged underwater waste plays a crucial role in safeguarding marine life and preserving the environment. While detecting floating and surface debris is relatively straightforward, quantifying submerged waste presents significant challenges due to factors like light refraction, absorption, suspended particles, and color distortion. This paper addresses these challenges by proposing the development of a custom dataset and an efficient detection approach for submerged marine debris. The dataset encompasses diverse underwater environments and incorporates annotations for precise labeling of debris instances. Ultimately, the primary objective of this custom dataset is to enhance the diversity of litter instances and improve their detection accuracy in deep submerged environments by leveraging state-of-the-art deep learning architectures., Comment: Presented the paper in University of Cambridge under TAROS 2023

Domain generalisation aims to promote the learning of domain-invariant features while suppressing domain-specific features, so that a model can generalise better to previously unseen target domains. An approach to domain generalisation for object detection is proposed, the first such approach applicable to any object detection architecture. Based on a rigorous mathematical analysis, we extend approaches based on feature alignment with a novel component for performing class conditional alignment at the instance level, in addition to aligning the marginal feature distributions across domains at the image level. This allows us to fully address both components of domain shift, i.e. covariate and concept shift, and learn a domain agnostic feature representation. We perform extensive evaluation with both one-stage (FCOS, YOLO) and two-stage (FRCNN) detectors, on a newly proposed benchmark comprising several different datasets for autonomous driving applications (Cityscapes, BDD10K, ACDC, IDD) as well as the GWHD dataset for precision agriculture, and show consistent improvements to the generalisation and localisation performance over baselines and state-of-the-art.