A Lightweight Degradation-Aware Framework for Robust Object Detection in Adverse Weather

Abstract

Object detection in adverse weather remains challenging due to the simultaneous degradation of visibility, structural boundaries, and semantic consistency. Existing restoration-driven or multi-branch detection approaches often fail to recover task-relevant features or introduce substantial computational overhead. To address this problem, DLC-SSD, a lightweight degradation-aware framework for detecting robust objects in adverse weather environments, is proposed. The framework integrates image enhancement and feature refinement into a single detection pipeline and adopts a hierarchical strategy in which global and local degradations are corrected at the image level, structural cues are reinforced in shallow high-resolution features, and semantic representations are refined in deep layers to suppress weather-induced noise. These components are jointly optimized end-to-end with the single-shot multibox detection (SSD) backbone. In rain, fog, and low-light conditions, DLC-SSD demonstrated more stable performance than conventional detectors and maintained a quasi-real-time inference speed, confirming its practicality in intelligent monitoring and autonomous driving environments.