  Rendering synthetic data (e.g., 3D CAD-rendered images) to generate
annotations for learning deep models in vision tasks has attracted increasing
attention in recent years. However, simply applying the models learnt on
synthetic images may lead to high generalization error on real images due to
domain shift. To address this issue, recent progress in cross-domain
recognition has featured the Mean Teacher, which directly simulates
unsupervised domain adaptation as semi-supervised learning. The domain gap is
thus naturally bridged with consistency regularization in a teacher-student
scheme. In this work, we advance this Mean Teacher paradigm to be applicable
for cross-domain detection. Specifically, we present Mean Teacher with Object
Relations (MTOR) that novelly remolds Mean Teacher under the backbone of Faster
R-CNN by integrating the object relations into the measure of consistency cost
between teacher and student modules. Technically, MTOR firstly learns
relational graphs that capture similarities between pairs of regions for
teacher and student respectively. The whole architecture is then optimized with
three consistency regularizations: 1) region-level consistency to align the
region-level predictions between teacher and student, 2) inter-graph
consistency for matching the graph structures between teacher and student, and
3) intra-graph consistency to enhance the similarity between regions of same
class within the graph of student. Extensive experiments are conducted on the
transfers across Cityscapes, Foggy Cityscapes, and SIM10k, and superior results
are reported when comparing to state-of-the-art approaches. More remarkably, we
obtain a new record of single model: 22.8% of mAP on Syn2Real detection
dataset.
