SCDA: A Style and Content Domain Adaptive Semantic Segmentation Method for Remote Sensing Images

Due to the differences in imaging methods and acquisition areas, remote sensing datasets can exhibit significant variations in both image style and content. In addition, the ground objects can be quite different in scale even within the same remote sensing image. These differences should be considered in remote sensing image segmentation tasks. Inspired by the recently developed domain generalization model WildNet, we propose a domain adaption framework named "Style and Content Domain Adaptation" (SCDA) for semantic segmentation tasks involving multiple remote sensing datasets with different data distributions. SCDA uses residual style feature transfer (RSFT) in the shallow layer of the baseline network model to enable source domain images to obtain style features from the target domain and reduce the loss of source domain content information. Considering the scale difference of different ground objects in remote sensing images, SCDA uses the projection of the source domain images, the style-transferred source domain images, and the target domain images to construct a multiscale content adaptation learning (MCAL) loss. This enables the model to capture multiscale target domain content information. Experiments show that the proposed method has obvious domain adaptability in remote sensing image segmentation. When performing cross-domain segmentation tasks from VaihingenIRRG to PotsdamIRRG, mIOU is 48.64%, and the F1 is 63.11%, marking improvements of 1.21% and 0.45%, respectively, compared with state-of-the-art methods. When performing cross-domain segmentation tasks from VaihingenIRRG to PotsdamRGB, the mIOU is 44.38%, an improvement of 0.77% over the most advanced methods. In summary, SCDA improves the semantic segmentation of remote sensing images through domain adaptation for both style and content. It fully utilizes multiple innovative modules and strategies to enhance the performance and the stability of the model.