# Curriculum-style Local-to-global Adaptation for Cross-domain Remote Sensing Image Segmentation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2203.01539 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.01539/

## Key facts

- Cited by 11 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 33 of its 51 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 3 Mar 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 33)

- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [Densely Connected Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.06993/) (2016)
- [DeepLab: Semantic Image Segmentation with Deep Convolutional Nets, Atrous Convolution, and Fully Connected CRFs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.00915/) (2016)
- [Encoder-Decoder with Atrous Separable Convolution for Semantic Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.02611/) (2018)
- [Pyramid Scene Parsing Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.01105/) (2016)
- [Unsupervised Domain Adaptation by Backpropagation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.7495/) (2014)
- [Learning Transferable Features with Deep Adaptation Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1502.02791/) (2015)
- [Adversarial Discriminative Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.05464/) (2017)
- [Deep CORAL: Correlation Alignment for Deep Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.01719/) (2016)
- [Playing for Data: Ground Truth from Computer Games](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.02192/) (2016)
- [Maximum Classifier Discrepancy for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.02560/) (2017)
- [BiSeNet: Bilateral Segmentation Network for Real-time Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.00897/) (2018)
- [ADVENT: Adversarial Entropy Minimization for Domain Adaptation in Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.12833/) (2018)
- [Deep Transfer Learning with Joint Adaptation Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1605.06636/) (2016)
- [Learning to Adapt Structured Output Space for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.10349/) (2018)
- [Domain Adaptive Faster R-CNN for Object Detection in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.03243/) (2018)
- [Unsupervised Domain Adaptation with Residual Transfer Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1602.04433/) (2016)
- [Unsupervised Pixel-Level Domain Adaptation with Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.05424/) (2016)
- [Prototypical Pseudo Label Denoising and Target Structure Learning for Domain Adaptive Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.10979/) (2021)
- [Simultaneous Deep Transfer Across Domains and Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1510.02192/) (2015)
- [Asymmetric Non-local Neural Networks for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.07678/) (2019)
- [Unsupervised Domain Adaptation via Structurally Regularized Deep Clustering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.08607/) (2020)
- [Progressive Domain Adaptation for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.11319/) (2019)
- [Diversify and Match: A Domain Adaptive Representation Learning Paradigm for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.05396/) (2019)
- [Domain-Symmetric Networks for Adversarial Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.04663/) (2019)
- [Beyond RGB: Very High Resolution Urban Remote Sensing With Multimodal Deep Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.08681/) (2017)
- [Pixel-Level Cycle Association: A New Perspective for Domain Adaptive Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.00147/) (2020)
- [From source to target and back: symmetric bi-directional adaptive GAN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.08824/) (2017)
- [Classification With an Edge: Improving Semantic Image Segmentation with Boundary Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.01337/) (2016)
- [Unsupervised Domain Adaptation using Generative Adversarial Networks for Semantic Segmentation of Aerial Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.03198/) (2019)

## Built on by (most cited first, 11 of 11)

- [SynDrone -- Multi-modal UAV Dataset for Urban Scenarios](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.10491/) (2023)
- [Unsupervised domain adaptation semantic segmentation of high-resolution remote sensing imagery with invariant domain-level prototype memory](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.07722/) (2022)
- [Self-Training Guided Disentangled Adaptation for Cross-Domain Remote Sensing Image Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.05526/) (2023)
- [DDF: A Novel Dual-Domain Image Fusion Strategy for Remote Sensing Image Semantic Segmentation with Unsupervised Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.02784/) (2024)
- [Unsupervised Domain Adaptation for Semantic Segmentation using One-shot Image-to-Image Translation via Latent Representation Mixing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.03826/) (2022)
- [Deep Learning Based Domain Adaptation Methods in Remote Sensing: A Comprehensive Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.15615/) (2025)
- [Causal Prototype-inspired Contrast Adaptation for Unsupervised Domain Adaptive Semantic Segmentation of High-resolution Remote Sensing Imagery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.03704/) (2024)
- [Data-Centric AI for Tropical Agricultural Mapping: Challenges, Strategies and Scalable Solutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.16207/) (2025)
- [Joint-Optimized Unsupervised Adversarial Domain Adaptation in Remote Sensing Segmentation with Prompted Foundation Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.05878/) (2024)
- [CFNet: Optimizing Remote Sensing Change Detection through Content-Aware Enhancement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.08505/) (2025)
- [From Pixels to Images: A Structural Survey of Deep Learning Paradigms in Remote Sensing Image Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.15147/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Although domain adaptation has been extensively studied in natural image-based segmentation task, the research on cross-domain segmentation for very high resolution (VHR) remote sensing images (RSIs) still remains underexplored. The VHR RSIs-based cross-domain segmentation mainly faces two critical challenges: 1) Large area land covers with many diverse object categories bring severe local patch-level data distribution deviations, thus yielding different adaptation difficulties for different local patches; 2) Different VHR sensor types or dynamically changing modes cause the VHR images to go through intensive data distribution differences even for the same geographical location, resulting in different global feature-level domain gap. To address these challenges, we propose a curriculum-style local-to-global cross-domain adaptation framework for the segmentation of VHR RSIs. The proposed curriculum-style adaptation performs the adaptation process in an easy-to-hard way according to the adaptation difficulties that can be obtained using an entropy-based score for each patch of the target domain, and thus well aligns the local patches in a domain image. The proposed local-to-global adaptation performs the feature alignment process from the locally semantic to globally structural feature discrepancies, and consists of a semantic-level domain classifier and an entropy-level domain classifier that can reduce the above cross-domain feature discrepancies. Extensive experiments have been conducted in various cross-domain scenarios, including geographic location variations and imaging mode variations, and the experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method can significantly boost the domain adaptability of segmentation networks for VHR RSIs. Our code is available at: https://github.com/BOBrown/CCDA_LGFA.