C2FXNet: Coarse-to-Fine Scene Expert for Unified Object Detection across Adverse Weather
Tianle Fang, Zhenbing Liu, Chong Yin, Bolun Li, Haoxiang Lu
Abstract
Object detection in adverse weather remains challenging because severe degradations weaken visual quality and disrupt semantic feature representations across diverse scenes. Existing methods usually rely on condition-specific designs, which limits their ability to generalize within a unified detector. In this paper, we propose a Coarse-to-Fine Scene Expert Network (C2FXNet) that achieves unified detection through hierarchical scene guidance. Specifically, C2FXNet introduces a dual-level guidance mechanism consisting of a Multi-step Reasoning Router (MRR), which performs GRU-based recurrent scene reasoning over compressed multi-scale visual cues and frozen coarse scene prototypes, and a Fine Scene Refinement (FSR) module, which uses image-specific semantic cues to modulate high-level features for local variation handling. Furthermore, a Scene-aware Mixture-of-Experts (SMoE) dynamically combines scene-specific experts under the joint guidance of MRR and FSR. By coupling coarse scene reasoning with fine-grained semantic refinement, C2FXNet enables robust multi-scene detection without scene-specific training. Extensive experiments on RTTS, ExDark, and our newly constructed Adverse Weather Dataset (AWD) demonstrate that C2FXNet consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods across foggy, dark, and clear conditions, reaching 63.70%, 71.14%, and 54.19% mAP on RTTS, ExDark, and AWD, respectively. The source code will be released at https://github.com/PolarisFTL/C2FXNet.