Coarse-to-Fine Hierarchical Alignment for UAV-based Human Detection using Diffusion Models

TL;DR

This paper presents a diffusion-based hierarchical framework to adapt synthetic UAV images for human detection, significantly reducing the domain gap and improving detection accuracy in real-world scenarios.

Contribution

The proposed CFHA framework introduces a three-stage diffusion process to effectively align synthetic data with real-world UAV images, enhancing detection performance.

Findings

Achieves up to +14.1 mAP50 improvement on Semantic-Drone benchmark.

Effectively narrows domain gap between synthetic and real images.

Demonstrates the importance of hierarchical alignment through ablation studies.

Abstract

Training object detectors demands extensive, task-specific annotations, yet this requirement becomes impractical in UAV-based human detection due to constantly shifting target distributions and the scarcity of labeled images. As a remedy, synthetic simulators are adopted to generate annotated data, with a low annotation cost. However, the domain gap between synthetic and real images hinders the model from being effectively applied to the target domain. Accordingly, we introduce Coarse-to-Fine Hierarchical Alignment (CFHA), a three-stage diffusion-based framework designed to transform synthetic data for UAV-based human detection, narrowing the domain gap while preserving the original synthetic labels. CFHA explicitly decouples global style and local content domain discrepancies and bridges those gaps using three modules: (1) Global Style Transfer -- a diffusion model aligns color, illumination, and texture statistics of synthetic images to the realistic style, using only a small real reference set; (2) Local Refinement -- a super-resolution diffusion model is used to facilitate fine-grained and photorealistic details for the small objects, such as human instances, preserving shape and boundary integrity; (3) Hallucination Removal -- a module that filters out human instances whose visual attributes do not align with real-world data to make the human appearance closer to the target distribution. Extensive experiments on public UAV Sim2Real detection benchmarks demonstrate that our methods significantly improve the detection accuracy compared to the non-transformed baselines. Specifically, our method achieves up to $+14.1$ improvement of mAP50 on Semantic-Drone benchmark. Ablation studies confirm the complementary roles of the global and local stages and highlight the importance of hierarchical alignment. The code is released at \href{https://github.com/liwd190019/CFHA}{this url}.