Joint image restoration for object detection in snowy weather

Abstract Although existing object detectors achieve encouraging performance of object detection and localisation under real ideal conditions, the detection performance in adverse weather conditions (snowy) is very poor and not enough to cope with the detection task in adverse weather conditions. Existing methods do not deal well with the effect of snow on the identity of object features or usually ignore or even discard potential information that can help improve the detection performance. To this end, the authors propose a novel and improved end‐to‐end object detection network joint image restoration. Specifically, in order to address the problem of identity degradation of object detection due to snow, an ingenious restoration‐detection dual branch network structure combined with a Multi‐Integrated Attention module is proposed, which can well mitigate the effect of snow on the identity of object features, thus improving the detection performance of the detector. In order to make more effective use of the features that are beneficial to the detection task, a Self‐Adaptive Feature Fusion module is introduced, which can help the network better learn the potential features that are beneficial to the detection and eliminate the effect of heavy or large local snow in the object area on detection by a special feature fusion, thus improving the network's detection capability in snowy. In addition, the authors construct a large‐scale, multi‐size snowy dataset called Synthetic and Real Snowy Dataset (SRSD), and it is a good and necessary complement and improvement to the existing snowy‐related tasks. Extensive experiments on a public snowy dataset (Snowy‐weather Datasets) and SRSD indicate that our method outperforms the existing state‐of‐the‐art object detectors.