Domain-Adaptive Benthonic Organism Detection via Uniformizing Light Field and Color Distribution

In this article, to exclusively conquer detection degradation of benthonic organisms due to domain shifting between training and testing scenarios, an innovative domain-adaptive detection scheme, termed DAD-ULC, is holistically invented by uniformising light field and color distribution. To that end, the encoder-decoder domain converter (EDDC) with residual connection is created, such that samples in degraded domains can be transformed into a unified domain. The underwater light field perception loss (ULFPL) is further conceptualized by virtue of a multiscale Gaussian filter, so as to directly expedite light-field conversion, getting rid of benthonic organism structure information, thereby facilitating light-domain adaptation. By exploiting the similarity between generated and referenced images in Lab space, a color distribution consistency loss (CDCL) is empowered for color-distribution transfer. Eventually, the DAD-ULC scheme is established in an end-to-end manner by integrating with EDDC, ULFPL, and CDCL modules, thereby enabling identical light-color domains between training and testing samples. Comprehensive experiments and comparisons conducted on detecting underwater objects (DUOs) and URPC2020 datasets sufficiently demonstrate effectiveness and superiority in diversified domain-shifting challenges.