Universal Domain Adaptation for Remote Sensing Image Scene Classification

The domain adaptation (DA) approaches available to date are usually not well suited for practical DA scenarios of remote sensing image classification since these methods (such as unsupervised DA) rely on rich prior knowledge about the relationship between label sets of source and target domains, and source data are often not accessible due to privacy or confidentiality issues. To this end, we propose a practical universal DA (UniDA) setting for remote sensing image scene classification that requires no prior knowledge on the label sets. Furthermore, a novel UniDA method without source data is proposed for cases when the source data are unavailable. The architecture of the model is divided into two parts: the source data generation stage and the model adaptation stage. The first stage estimates the conditional distribution of source data from the pretrained model using the knowledge of class separability in the source domain and then synthesizes the source data. With this synthetic source data in hand, it becomes a UniDA task to classify a target sample correctly if it belongs to any category in the source label set or mark it as “unknown” otherwise. In the second stage, a novel transferable weight that distinguishes the shared and private label sets in each domain promotes the adaptation in the automatically discovered shared label set and recognizes the “unknown” samples successfully. Empirical results show that the proposed model is effective and practical for remote sensing image scene classification, regardless of whether the source data are available or not. The code is available at https://github.com/zhu-xlab/UniDA .