Towards Robust Cross-Dataset Object Detection Generalization under Domain Specificity

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Chakraborty, Ritabrata, Mitra, Hrishit, Palaiahnakote, Shivakumara, Pal, Umapada
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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author Chakraborty, Ritabrata
Mitra, Hrishit
Palaiahnakote, Shivakumara
Pal, Umapada
author_facet Chakraborty, Ritabrata
Mitra, Hrishit
Palaiahnakote, Shivakumara
Pal, Umapada
contents Object detectors often perform well in-distribution, yet degrade sharply on a different benchmark. We study cross-dataset object detection (CD-OD) through a lens of setting specificity. We group benchmarks into setting-agnostic datasets with diverse everyday scenes and setting-specific datasets tied to a narrow environment, and evaluate a standard detector family across all train--test pairs. This reveals a clear structure in CD-OD: transfer within the same setting type is relatively stable, while transfer across setting types drops substantially and is often asymmetric. The most severe breakdowns occur when transferring from specific sources to agnostic targets, and persist after open-label alignment, indicating that domain shift dominates in the hardest regimes. To disentangle domain shift from label mismatch, we compare closed-label transfer with an open-label protocol that maps predicted classes to the nearest target label using CLIP similarity. Open-label evaluation yields consistent but bounded gains, and many corrected cases correspond to semantic near-misses supported by the image evidence. Overall, we provide a principled characterization of CD-OD under setting specificity and practical guidance for evaluating detectors under distribution shift. Code will be released at \href{[https://github.com/Ritabrata04/cdod-icpr.git}{https://github.com/Ritabrata04/cdod-icpr}.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2601_09497
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Towards Robust Cross-Dataset Object Detection Generalization under Domain Specificity
Chakraborty, Ritabrata
Mitra, Hrishit
Palaiahnakote, Shivakumara
Pal, Umapada
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Machine Learning
Object detectors often perform well in-distribution, yet degrade sharply on a different benchmark. We study cross-dataset object detection (CD-OD) through a lens of setting specificity. We group benchmarks into setting-agnostic datasets with diverse everyday scenes and setting-specific datasets tied to a narrow environment, and evaluate a standard detector family across all train--test pairs. This reveals a clear structure in CD-OD: transfer within the same setting type is relatively stable, while transfer across setting types drops substantially and is often asymmetric. The most severe breakdowns occur when transferring from specific sources to agnostic targets, and persist after open-label alignment, indicating that domain shift dominates in the hardest regimes. To disentangle domain shift from label mismatch, we compare closed-label transfer with an open-label protocol that maps predicted classes to the nearest target label using CLIP similarity. Open-label evaluation yields consistent but bounded gains, and many corrected cases correspond to semantic near-misses supported by the image evidence. Overall, we provide a principled characterization of CD-OD under setting specificity and practical guidance for evaluating detectors under distribution shift. Code will be released at \href{[https://github.com/Ritabrata04/cdod-icpr.git}{https://github.com/Ritabrata04/cdod-icpr}.
title Towards Robust Cross-Dataset Object Detection Generalization under Domain Specificity
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.09497