BAN: A Universal Paradigm for Cross-Scene Classification Under Noisy Annotations From RGB and Hyperspectral Remote Sensing Images

While domain adaptation (DA) methods have made significant strides in remote sensing community, most current works assume that the source domain labels are accurate. However, limited emphasis has been placed on the scenario where source data are mislabeled with noisy annotations, which is more common in real applications and referred to as noisy DA (NDA). This article formulates remote sensing cross-scene classification on NDA scenarios and proposes a novel network called bilateral adaptation network (BAN), which consists of two parts: 1) forward learning (FL), which utilizes a model learning from the noisy source domain and transfers knowledge to target domain; and 2) backward learning (BL), which utilizes a dual model to acquire knowledge from the target domain and transfer it to source domain. We conduct two parts alternately and adopt a symmetrical Kullback-Leibler (KL) loss to align predictions of the model and its dual model in the same domain. This interactive strategy is able to explore bilateral relationships between domains, implicitly reducing label noise in the source domain. In addition, BAN could serve as a universal paradigm to not only improve the existing NDA methods but also enhance recent DA approaches. Comprehensive evaluations on three publicly available RGB-band remote sensing datasets and two hyperspectral datasets validate the superior effectiveness of our proposed BAN. BAN improves the average accuracy by 6.70%–15.70% on RGB datasets and overall accuracy (OA) by 1.36%–3.14% on hyperspectral datasets with flip-20% noise compared to other state-of-the-art DA and NDA approaches. Promising results indicate the potential of our approach in tackling more general and practical problems with noisy source domain.