# Decomposition-based Unsupervised Domain Adaptation for Remote Sensing Image Semantic Segmentation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.04531 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.04531/

## Key facts

- Cited by 12 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 46 of its 105 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 6 Apr 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 46)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [Swin Transformer: Hierarchical Vision Transformer using Shifted Windows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14030/) (2021)
- [A Simple Framework for Contrastive Learning of Visual Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.05709/) (2020)
- [Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.00667/) (2022)
- [Domain-Adversarial Training of Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.07818/) (2015)
- [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)
- [Domain Separation Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.06019/) (2016)
- [High Frequency Component Helps Explain the Generalization of Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.13545/) (2019)
- [How Do Vision Transformers Work?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.06709/) (2022)
- [ResUNet-a: a deep learning framework for semantic segmentation of remotely sensed data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.00592/) (2019)
- [LoveDA: A Remote Sensing Land-Cover Dataset for Domain Adaptive Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.08733/) (2021)
- [SpectralGPT: Spectral Remote Sensing Foundation Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.07113/) (2023)
- [CDDFuse: Correlation-Driven Dual-Branch Feature Decomposition for Multi-Modality Image Fusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.14461/) (2022)
- [ResUNet++: An Advanced Architecture for Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.07067/) (2019)
- [FloodNet: A High Resolution Aerial Imagery Dataset for Post Flood Scene Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.02951/) (2020)
- [UNetFormer: A UNet-like Transformer for Efficient Semantic Segmentation of Remote Sensing Urban Scene Imagery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.08937/) (2021)
- [Deep Reconstruction-Classification Networks for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.03516/) (2016)
- [TransGAN: Two Pure Transformers Can Make One Strong GAN, and That Can Scale Up](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.07074/) (2021)
- [Advancing Plain Vision Transformer Towards Remote Sensing Foundation Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.03987/) (2022)
- [Anti-Oversmoothing in Deep Vision Transformers via the Fourier Domain Analysis: From Theory to Practice](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.05962/) (2022)
- [CDTrans: Cross-domain Transformer for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.06165/) (2021)
- [More Diverse Means Better: Multimodal Deep Learning Meets Remote Sensing Imagery Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.05457/) (2020)
- [Towards Large-Scale Small Object Detection: Survey and Benchmarks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.14096/) (2022)
- [ViTGAN: Training GANs with Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.04589/) (2021)
- [Improving Vision Transformers by Revisiting High-frequency Components](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.00993/) (2022)
- [Foreground-Aware Relation Network for Geospatial Object Segmentation in High Spatial Resolution Remote Sensing Imagery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.09766/) (2020)
- [Multi-Attention-Network for Semantic Segmentation of Fine Resolution Remote Sensing Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.02130/) (2020)
- [Cross-City Matters: A Multimodal Remote Sensing Benchmark Dataset for Cross-City Semantic Segmentation using High-Resolution Domain Adaptation Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.16499/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 12 of 12)

- [A Unified Framework with Multimodal Fine-tuning for Remote Sensing Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.11160/) (2024)
- [CADFormer: Fine-Grained Cross-modal Alignment and Decoding Transformer for Referring Remote Sensing Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.23456/) (2025)
- [Enhancing Environmental Monitoring through Multispectral Imaging: The WasteMS Dataset for Semantic Segmentation of Lakeside Waste](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.17028/) (2024)
- [Why Do DiT Editors Drift? Plug-and-Play Low Frequency Alignment in VAE Latent Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.08250/) (2026)
- [Deep Learning Based Domain Adaptation Methods in Remote Sensing: A Comprehensive Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.15615/) (2025)
- [Kolmogorov-Arnold Network for Remote Sensing Image Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.07390/) (2025)
- [ClassWise-CRF: Category-Specific Fusion for Enhanced Semantic Segmentation of Remote Sensing Imagery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.21491/) (2025)
- [InfoSAM: Fine-Tuning the Segment Anything Model from An Information-Theoretic Perspective](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.21920/) (2025)
- [Cross-View Open-Vocabulary Object Detection in Aerial Imagery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.03858/) (2025)
- [Source-Free Domain Adaptive Semantic Segmentation of Remote Sensing Images with Diffusion-Guided Label Enrichment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.18502/) (2025)
- [State Space Models Meet Remote Sensing: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.25329/) (2026)
- [COBICount: Separating Object and Background Responses for Remote Sensing Object Counting Without Training on Target Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.39366/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) techniques are vital for semantic segmentation in geosciences, effectively utilizing remote sensing imagery across diverse domains. However, most existing UDA methods, which focus on domain alignment at the high-level feature space, struggle to simultaneously retain local spatial details and global contextual semantics. To overcome these challenges, a novel decomposition scheme is proposed to guide domain-invariant representation learning. Specifically, multiscale high/low-frequency decomposition (HLFD) modules are proposed to decompose feature maps into high- and low-frequency components across different subspaces. This decomposition is integrated into a fully global-local generative adversarial network (GLGAN) that incorporates global-local transformer blocks (GLTBs) to enhance the alignment of decomposed features. By integrating the HLFD scheme and the GLGAN, a novel decomposition-based UDA framework called De-GLGAN is developed to improve the cross-domain transferability and generalization capability of semantic segmentation models. Extensive experiments on two UDA benchmarks, namely ISPRS Potsdam and Vaihingen, and LoveDA Rural and Urban, demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of the proposed approach over existing state-of-the-art UDA methods. The source code for this work is accessible at https://github.com/sstary/SSRS.