Unsupervised Domain Adaptation Augmented by Mutually Boosted Attention for Semantic Segmentation of VHR Remote Sensing Images

This work investigates unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA)-based semantic segmentation of very high-resolution (VHR) remote sensing (RS) images from different domains. Most existing UDA methods resort to generative adversarial networks (GANs) to cope with the domain shift problem caused by the discrepancies across different domains. However, these GAN-based UDA methods directly align two domains in the appearance, latent, or output space based on convolutional neural networks (CNNs), making them ineffective in exploiting long-range dependencies across the high-level feature maps derived from different domains. Unfortunately, such high-level features play an essential role in characterizing RS images with complex content. To circumvent this obstacle, a mutually boosted attention transformer (MBATrans) is proposed to capture cross-domain dependencies of semantic feature representations in this work. Compared with conventional UDA methods, MBATrans can significantly reduce domain discrepancies by capturing transferable features using global attention. More specifically, MBATrans utilizes a novel mutually boosted attention (MBA) module to align cross-domain feature maps while enhancing domain-general features. Furthermore, a novel GAN-based network with improved discriminative capability is devised by integrating an additional discriminator to learn domain-specific features. Extensive experiments on two large-scale VHR RS datasets, namely, International Society for Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing (ISPRS) Potsdam and Vaihingen, confirm the superior performance of the proposed MBATrans-augmented GAN (MBATA-GAN) architecture. The source code in this work is available at https://github.com/sstary/SSRS.