A Source-free Domain Adaptive Polyp Detection Framework with Style Diversification Flow

The automatic detection of polyps across colonoscopy and Wireless Capsule Endoscopy (WCE) datasets is crucial for early diagnosis and curation of colorectal cancer. Existing deep learning approaches either require mass training data collected from multiple sites or use unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) technique with labeled source data. However, these methods are not applicable when the data is not accessible due to privacy concerns or data storage limitations. Aiming to achieve source-free domain adaptive polyp detection, we propose a consistency based model that utilizes Source Model as Proxy Teacher (SMPT) with only a transferable pretrained model and unlabeled target data. SMPT first transfers the stored domain-invariant knowledge in the pretrained source model to the target model via Source Knowledge Distillation (SKD), then uses Proxy Teacher Rectification (PTR) to rectify the source model with temporal ensemble of the target model. Moreover, to alleviate the biased knowledge caused by domain gaps, we propose Uncertainty-Guided Online Bootstrapping (UGOB) to adaptively assign weights for each target image regarding their uncertainty. In addition, we design Source Style Diversification Flow (SSDF) that gradually generates diverse style images and relaxes style-sensitive channels based on source and target information to enhance the robustness of the model towards style variation. The capacities of SMPT and SSDF are further boosted with iterative optimization, constructing a stronger framework SMPT++ for cross-domain polyp detection. Extensive experiments are conducted on five distinct polyp datasets under two types of cross-domain settings. Our proposed method shows the state-of-the-art performance and even outperforms previous UDA approaches that require the source data by a large margin. The source code is available at github.com/CityU-AIM-Group/SFPolypDA.