DODA: Diffusion for Object-detection Domain Adaptation in Agriculture

The diverse and high-quality content generated by recent generative models demonstrates the great potential of using synthetic data to train downstream models. However, in vision, especially in objection detection, related areas are not fully explored, the synthetic images are merely used to balance the long tails of existing datasets, and the accuracy of the generated labels is low, the full potential of generative models has not been exploited. In this paper, we propose DODA, a data synthesizer that can generate high-quality object detection data for new domains in agriculture. Specifically, we improve the controllability of layout-to-image through encoding layout as an image, thereby improving the quality of labels, and use a visual encoder to provide visual clues for the diffusion model to decouple visual features from the diffusion model, and empowering the model the ability to generate data in new domains. On the Global Wheat Head Detection (GWHD) Dataset, which is the largest dataset in agriculture and contains diverse domains, using the data synthesized by DODA improves the performance of the object detector by 12.74-17.76 AP$_{50}$ in the domain that was significantly shifted from the training data.