Research Article | Open Access | Download PDF
Volume 13 | Issue 6 | Year 2026 | Article Id. IJECE-V13I6P107 | DOI : https://doi.org/10.14445/23488549/IJECE-V13I6P107DATNet-RS: Domain-Adaptive Temporal Attention with Residual Shrinkage and Online PSO for Robust Object Detection in Adverse Weather
Joseph Rish Simenthy, Pallavi Singh
| Received | Revised | Accepted | Published |
|---|---|---|---|
| 09 Mar 2026 | 08 Apr 2026 | 07 May 2026 | 27 Jun 2026 |
Citation :
Joseph Rish Simenthy, Pallavi Singh, "DATNet-RS: Domain-Adaptive Temporal Attention with Residual Shrinkage and Online PSO for Robust Object Detection in Adverse Weather," International Journal of Electronics and Communication Engineering, vol. 13, no. 6, pp. 78-97, 2026. Crossref, https://doi.org/10.14445/23488549/IJECE-V13I6P107
Abstract
Extreme weather conditions are a serious setback to the reliability of object detection in real-world driving conditions. This paper introduces DATNet-RS, a domain adaptive detection system that runs effectively in these conditions and does not require retraining or labelled weather data. A six-component multi-scale attention module is proposed, including local and global versions of channel, spatial, and temporal attention, which, in combination, reduce the noise-enhancing feature channels, highlight spatially consistent object regions, and capitalize on the frame-to-frame temporal continuity. Second, there is a common residual shrinkage denoising block on all levels of the feature pyramid to reduce the low-amplitude noise activations caused by weather, but not the structurally informative responses. Third, a gradient-free online inference-time adaptation scheme is added, where a small nine-dimensional parameter vector - controlling all attention magnitudes and shrinkage thresholds - is jointly optimized by the use of Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO). Experiments demonstrate that DATNet-RS continuously improves the performance compared to the baseline in all four adverse conditions and increases average mAP@0.5 to 75.1% (+4.3 percentage points) and average mAP@0.5:0.95 to 44.2% (+2.9 percentage points), in addition to maintaining real-time performance of GPU inference at about 50 FPS. On mAP at 0.5, the improvement of per-condition is between +3.9% (night) to +4.9% (rain). The assessment is done by isolating the contribution of each component in a seven-configuration ablation study and making comparisons between these and YOLOv9, RT-DETR, and Deformable DETR position DATNet-RS, a highly competitive real-time detector in the evaluated set.
Keywords
Object detection, Attention mechanisms, Temporal modeling, Residual Shrinkage, Particle Swarm Optimization, Feature Pyramid Network.
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