Domain Adaptation via a Task-Specific Classifier Framework for Remote Sensing Cross-Scene Classification

The scene classification of high spatial resolution (HSR) imagery involves labeling an HSR image with a specific high-level semantic class according to the composition of the semantic objects and their spatial relationships. As such, scene classification has attracted increased attention in recent years, and many different algorithms have now been proposed for the cross-scene classification task. However, the recently proposed scene classification methods based on deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) still suffer from domain shift problems, because of the training data and validation data not following the assumption of independent and identical distributions. The employment of generative adversarial networks has been found to be an effective way to bridge the domain shift/gap. However, the existing cross-scene classification methods do not use the classification information in the target domain, and the domain classifier is task-independent for different scene classification tasks. In this article, to solve this problem, domain adaptation via a task-specific classifier (DATSNET) framework is proposed for HSR image scene classification. Task-specific classifiers and minimizing and maximizing, “ i.e., minimaxing,” of the classifier discrepancy are integrated in the DATSNET framework. The task-specific classifiers are proposed to align the distributions of the source domain features and target domain features by utilizing task-specific decision boundaries in the target domain. In order to align the two task-specific classifiers’ feature distributions, minimaxing the defined discrepancy between the different classifiers in an adversarial manner is proposed to obtain better task-specific classifier boundaries in the target domain and a better-aligned feature distribution in both domains. The experimental results obtained with different remote sensing cross-scene classification tasks demonstrate that the proposed method achieves a significantly improved performance compared with the other state-of-the-art remote sensing cross-scene classification algorithms.