Two-Stage Domain Adaptation Based on Image and Feature Levels for Cloud Detection in Cross-Spatiotemporal Domain

Cloud detection in high-resolution remote sensing images (HRSIs) is widely applied to cross-spatiotemporal domains with various scenarios change. However, cloud detection semantic segmentation models based on limited samples cannot ensure the consistency of data distribution between the source domain (SD) and the target domain (TD), resulting in a decrease in cross-domain segmentation accuracy and robust ability. Therefore, this article proposed a two-stage domain adaptation based on the image and feature levels (TDAIF) cloud detection framework. TDAIF designs a pseudo-TD data generator (PTDDG) at the image level to fuse the SD foreground and TD background information effectively, assisting the model in mining invariant semantic knowledge of the TD. Then, a domain discriminator and self-ensembling joint (DDSEJ) framework is explored at the feature level to implicitly handle the alignment of global features and the optimization of decision boundaries-local features. TDAIF ultimately weakens the impact of image radiation diversity and scale divergence and improves the adaptive processing capabilities for cross-spatiotemporal data. Horizontal and internal comparative experiments on TDAIF were conducted on three domain transfer data. Experimental results show that TDAIF dramatically reduces the network accuracy loss in cross-domain. Compared with CycleGAN and AdaptSegNet, the IoU is improved by about 30%. TDAIF performs better than state-of-the-art computational visual domain adaptation (DA) methods, indicating that hierarchical data alignment from the image to the feature level is very effective.