Unsupervised Day-Night Domain Adaptation with a Physics Prior for Image Classification

Abstract

While deep neural networks show great potential for being part of safety-critical applications such as autonomous driving, covering their sensitivity to illumination shifts by adding training data is of- ten non-trivial. The undesired illumination shift between train and test data can be addressed by domain adaptation methods. Recent work [9] has demonstrated performance improvements with a novel zero-shot domain adaptation setting by in- troducing a physics-based visual inductive prior - a trainable Color Invariant Convolution (CIConv) layer - aiming to transform its input to a more do- main invariant representation.
We compare the performance of image classifica- tion for day-night domain adaptation in the zero- shot and the unsupervised setting, and explore the effectiveness of using CIConv in both settings. We show that unsupervised domain adaptation reduces the day-night distribution shift similarly to CIConv in the zero-shot setting. We demonstrate improved performance when CIConv and unsupervised day- night domain adaptation are combined.