# MORDA: A Synthetic Dataset to Facilitate Adaptation of Object Detectors to Unseen Real-target Domain While Preserving Performance on Real-source Domain

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.04950 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.04950/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 27 of its 34 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 9 Jan 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 27 of 27)

- [Faster R-CNN: Towards Real-Time Object Detection with Region Proposal Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.01497/) (2015)
- [nuScenes: A multimodal dataset for autonomous driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.11027/) (2019)
- [Scalability in Perception for Autonomous Driving: Waymo Open Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.04838/) (2019)
- [CARLA: An Open Urban Driving Simulator](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.03938/) (2017)
- [PointPillars: Fast Encoders for Object Detection from Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.05784/) (2018)
- [FCOS: Fully Convolutional One-Stage Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.01355/) (2019)
- [MMDetection: Open MMLab Detection Toolbox and Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.07155/) (2019)
- [Center-based 3D Object Detection and Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11275/) (2020)
- [BEVFusion: Multi-Task Multi-Sensor Fusion with Unified Bird's-Eye View Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.13542/) (2022)
- [Playing for Data: Ground Truth from Computer Games](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.02192/) (2016)
- [DETR3D: 3D Object Detection from Multi-view Images via 3D-to-2D Queries](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.06922/) (2021)
- [ADVENT: Adversarial Entropy Minimization for Domain Adaptation in Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.12833/) (2018)
- [FDA: Fourier Domain Adaptation for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.05498/) (2020)
- [Virtual KITTI 2](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.10773/) (2020)
- [Virtual Worlds as Proxy for Multi-Object Tracking Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1605.06457/) (2016)
- [OPV2V: An Open Benchmark Dataset and Fusion Pipeline for Perception with Vehicle-to-Vehicle Communication](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.07644/) (2021)
- [SMOKE: Single-Stage Monocular 3D Object Detection via Keypoint Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.10111/) (2020)
- [Unsupervised Intra-domain Adaptation for Semantic Segmentation through Self-Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.07703/) (2020)
- [Playing for Benchmarks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.07322/) (2017)
- [ST3D: Self-training for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation on 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.05346/) (2021)
- [SHIFT: A Synthetic Driving Dataset for Continuous Multi-Task Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.08367/) (2022)
- [CRN: Camera Radar Net for Accurate, Robust, Efficient 3D Perception](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.00670/) (2023)
- [SSN: Shape Signature Networks for Multi-class Object Detection from Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.02774/) (2020)
- [ST3D++: Denoised Self-training for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation on 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.06682/) (2021)
- [RadarDistill: Boosting Radar-based Object Detection Performance via Knowledge Distillation from LiDAR Features](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.05061/) (2024)
- [Temporal Coherence for Active Learning in Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.11757/) (2019)
- [UADA3D: Unsupervised Adversarial Domain Adaptation for 3D Object Detection with Sparse LiDAR and Large Domain Gaps](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.17633/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Deep neural network (DNN) based perception models are indispensable in the development of autonomous vehicles (AVs). However, their reliance on large-scale, high-quality data is broadly recognized as a burdensome necessity due to the substantial cost of data acquisition and labeling. Further, the issue is not a one-time concern, as AVs might need a new dataset if they are to be deployed to another region (real-target domain) that the in-hand dataset within the real-source domain cannot incorporate. To mitigate this burden, we propose leveraging synthetic environments as an auxiliary domain where the characteristics of real domains are reproduced. This approach could enable indirect experience about the real-target domain in a time- and cost-effective manner. As a practical demonstration of our methodology, nuScenes and South Korea are employed to represent real-source and real-target domains, respectively. That means we construct digital twins for several regions of South Korea, and the data-acquisition framework of nuScenes is reproduced. Blending the aforementioned components within a simulator allows us to obtain a synthetic-fusion domain in which we forge our novel driving dataset, MORDA: Mixture Of Real-domain characteristics for synthetic-data-assisted Domain Adaptation. To verify the value of synthetic features that MORDA provides in learning about driving environments of South Korea, 2D/3D detectors are trained solely on a combination of nuScenes and MORDA. Afterward, their performance is evaluated on the unforeseen real-world dataset (AI-Hub) collected in South Korea. Our experiments present that MORDA can significantly improve mean Average Precision (mAP) on AI-Hub dataset while that on nuScenes is retained or slightly enhanced.