Unsupervised Adversarial Domain Adaptation with Error-Correcting Boundaries and Feature Adaption Metric for Remote-Sensing Scene Classification

Abstract

Unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) based on adversarial learning for remote-sensing scene classification has become a research hotspot because of the need to alleviating the lack of annotated training data. Existing methods train classifiers according to their ability to distinguish features from source or target domains. However, they suffer from the following two limitations: (1) the classifier is trained on source samples and forms a source-domain-specific boundary, which ignores features from the target domain and (2) semantically meaningful features are merely built from the adversary of a generator and a discriminator, which ignore selecting the domain invariant features. These issues limit the distribution matching performance of source and target domains, since each domain has its distinctive characteristic. To resolve these issues, we propose a framework with error-correcting boundaries and feature adaptation metric. Specifically, we design an error-correcting boundaries mechanism to build target-domain-specific classifier boundaries via multi-classifiers and error-correcting discrepancy loss, which significantly distinguish target samples and reduce their distinguished uncertainty. Then, we employ a feature adaptation metric structure to enhance the adaptation of ambiguous features via shallow layers of the backbone convolutional neural network and alignment loss, which automatically learns domain invariant features. The experimental results on four public datasets outperform other UDA methods of remote-sensing scene classification.

Keywords

• remote-sensing scene classification
• adversarial learning
• unsupervised domain adaptation
• target-domain-specific classifier boundaries
• domain invariant features