Data-Efficient Domain Adaptation for Semantic Segmentation of Aerial Imagery Using Generative Adversarial Networks

Despite the significant advances noted in semantic segmentation of aerial imagery, a considerable limitation is blocking its adoption in real cases. If we test a segmentation model on a new area that is not included in its initial training set, accuracy will decrease remarkably. This is caused by the domain shift between the new targeted domain and the source domain used to train the model. In this paper, we addressed this challenge and proposed a new algorithm that uses Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN) architecture to minimize the domain shift and increase the ability of the model to work on new targeted domains. The proposed GAN architecture contains two GAN networks. The first GAN network converts the chosen image from the target domain into a semantic label. The second GAN network converts this generated semantic label into an image that belongs to the source domain but conserves the semantic map of the target image. This resulting image will be used by the semantic segmentation model to generate a better semantic label of the first chosen image. Our algorithm is tested on the ISPRS semantic segmentation dataset and improved the global accuracy by a margin up to 24% when passing from Potsdam domain to Vaihingen domain. This margin can be increased by addition of other labeled data from the target domain. To minimize the cost of supervision in the translation process, we proposed a methodology to use these labeled data efficiently.