MWNet: object detection network applicable for different weather conditions

The existing vehicle environment perception systems remain limited with regard to the ability to detect objects under complex weather conditions. This study proposes a novel network architecture named multi-weather network (MWNet), which can improve the performance of the on-board object detection system under extreme weather conditions. It consists of an encoder and a decoder. The encoder is comprised of shared convolutional layers used to extract features, while the decoder consists of three subnets, namely weather classification subnet, bad weather detection subnet, and fair weather detection subnet. Moreover, the results are satisfactory even for images photographed under different weather and illumination conditions.