# Leveraging Topology for Domain Adaptive Road Segmentation in Satellite and Aerial Imagery

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2309.15625 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.15625/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 45 of its 80 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 27 Sep 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 45)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [Fully Convolutional Networks for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.4038/) (2014)
- [The Cityscapes Dataset for Semantic Urban Scene Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.01685/) (2016)
- [DeepLab: Semantic Image Segmentation with Deep Convolutional Nets, Atrous Convolution, and Fully Connected CRFs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.00915/) (2016)
- [Domain-Adversarial Training of Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.07818/) (2015)
- [Pyramid Scene Parsing Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.01105/) (2016)
- [SegNet: A Deep Convolutional Encoder-Decoder Architecture for Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.00561/) (2015)
- [Adversarial Discriminative Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.05464/) (2017)
- [CyCADA: Cycle-Consistent Adversarial Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.03213/) (2017)
- [Playing for Data: Ground Truth from Computer Games](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.02192/) (2016)
- [ADVENT: Adversarial Entropy Minimization for Domain Adaptation in Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.12833/) (2018)
- [Learning to Adapt Structured Output Space for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.10349/) (2018)
- [Semantic Image Segmentation with Deep Convolutional Nets and Fully Connected CRFs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.7062/) (2014)
- [Confidence Regularized Self-Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.09822/) (2019)
- [Learning Deconvolution Network for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04366/) (2015)
- [Taking A Closer Look at Domain Shift: Category-level Adversaries for Semantics Consistent Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.09478/) (2018)
- [DeepGlobe 2018: A Challenge to Parse the Earth through Satellite Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.06561/) (2018)
- [LinkNet: Exploiting Encoder Representations for Efficient Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.03718/) (2017)
- [Unsupervised Intra-domain Adaptation for Semantic Segmentation through Self-Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.07703/) (2020)
- [Wider or Deeper: Revisiting the ResNet Model for Visual Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.10080/) (2016)
- [SpaceNet: A Remote Sensing Dataset and Challenge Series](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.01232/) (2018)
- [DLOW: Domain Flow for Adaptation and Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.05418/) (2018)
- [Learning Texture Invariant Representation for Domain Adaptation of Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.00867/) (2020)
- [Domain Adaptation for Semantic Segmentation with Maximum Squares Loss](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.13589/) (2019)
- [Differential Treatment for Stuff and Things: A Simple Unsupervised Domain Adaptation Method for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.08040/) (2020)
- [No More Discrimination: Cross City Adaptation of Road Scene Segmenters](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.08509/) (2017)
- [All about Structure: Adapting Structural Information across Domains for Boosting Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.12212/) (2019)
- [RoadTracer: Automatic Extraction of Road Networks from Aerial Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.03680/) (2018)
- [Fully Convolutional Adaptation Networks for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.08286/) (2018)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [Joint-Optimized Unsupervised Adversarial Domain Adaptation in Remote Sensing Segmentation with Prompted Foundation Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.05878/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Getting precise aspects of road through segmentation from remote sensing imagery is useful for many real-world applications such as autonomous vehicles, urban development and planning, and achieving sustainable development goals. Roads are only a small part of the image, and their appearance, type, width, elevation, directions, etc. exhibit large variations across geographical areas. Furthermore, due to differences in urbanization styles, planning, and the natural environments; regions along the roads vary significantly. Due to these variations among the train and test domains, the road segmentation algorithms fail to generalize to new geographical locations. Unlike the generic domain alignment scenarios, road segmentation has no scene structure, and generic domain adaptation methods are unable to enforce topological properties like continuity, connectivity, smoothness, etc., thus resulting in degraded domain alignment. In this work, we propose a topology-aware unsupervised domain adaptation approach for road segmentation in remote sensing imagery. Specifically, we predict road skeleton, an auxiliary task to impose the topological constraints. To enforce consistent predictions of road and skeleton, especially in the unlabeled target domain, the conformity loss is defined across the skeleton prediction head and the road-segmentation head. Furthermore, for self-training, we filter out the noisy pseudo-labels by using a connectivity-based pseudo-labels refinement strategy, on both road and skeleton segmentation heads, thus avoiding holes and discontinuities. Extensive experiments on the benchmark datasets show the effectiveness of the proposed approach compared to existing state-of-the-art methods. Specifically, for SpaceNet to DeepGlobe adaptation, the proposed approach outperforms the competing methods by a minimum margin of 6.6%, 6.7%, and 9.8% in IoU, F1-score, and APLS, respectively.