Domain Adaptation Using Representation Learning for the Classification of Remote Sensing Images

Traditional machine learning (ML) techniques are often employed to perform complex pattern recognition tasks for remote sensing images, such as land-use classification. In order to obtain acceptable classification results, these techniques require there to be sufficient training data available for every particular image. Obtaining training samples is challenging, particularly for near real-time applications. Therefore, past knowledge must be utilized to overcome the lack of training data in the current regime. This challenge is known as domain adaptation (DA), and one of the common approaches to this problem is based on finding invariant representations for both the training and test data, which are often assumed to come from different “domains.” In this study, we consider two deep learning techniques for learning domain-invariant representations: Denoising autoencoders (DAE) and domain-adversarial neural networks (DANN). While the DAE is a typical two-stage DA technique (unsupervised invariant representation learning followed by supervised classification), DANN is an end-to-end approach where invariant representation learning and classification are considered jointly during training. The proposed techniques are applied to both hyperspectral and multispectral images under different DA scenarios. Results obtained show that the proposed techniques outperform traditional approaches, such as principal component analysis (PCA) and kernel PCA, and can also compete with a fully supervised model in the multispatial scenario.