OnDA-DETR: Online Domain Adaptation for Detection Transformers with Self-Training Framework

This paper presents a novel method for online domain adaptation (OnDA) for DEtection TRansformer (DETR)-based object detection models called OnDA-DETR. OnDA is a domain adaptation paradigm that adapts a model trained on the source domain data to perform well on the target domain in an online manner during testing, using only the unlabeled test data from the target domain. Due to challenging and realistic problem settings, OnDA has garnered significant attention. However, OnDA methods for DETR-based models, which have demonstrated excellent performance in object detection research fields, had not been developed. OnDA-DETR is the first OnDA method specifically designed for DETR-based models. OnDA-DETR incorporates a self-training framework that generates pseudo-labels for the unlabeled target domain data. To effectively incorporate the self-training framework into DETR-based models, we leverage recall-aware pseudo-labeling and quality-aware training in OnDA-DETR. Experimental results indicate that OnDA-DETR improves the performance of the source-trained model by about 3.0 % points through OnDA.