Adversarial pair-wise distribution matching for remote sensing image cross-scene classification

Remarkable achievements have been made in the field of remote sensing cross-scene classification in recent years. However, most methods directly align the entire image features for cross-scene knowledge transfer. They usually ignore the high background complexity and low category consistency of remote sensing images, which can significantly impair the performance of distribution alignment. Besides, shortcomings of the adversarial training paradigm and the inability to guarantee the prediction discriminability and diversity can also hinder cross-scene classification performance. To alleviate the above problems, we propose a novel cross-scene classification framework in a discriminator-free adversarial paradigm, called Adversarial Pair-wise Distribution Matching (APDM), to avoid irrelevant knowledge transfer and enable effective cross-domain modeling. Specifically, we propose the pair-wise cosine discrepancy for both inter-domain and intra-domain prediction measurements to fully leverage the prediction information, which can suppress negative semantic features and implicitly align the cross-scene distributions. Nuclear-norm maximization and minimization are introduced to enhance the target prediction quality and increase the applicability of the source knowledge, respectively. As a general cross-scene framework, APDM can be easily embedded with existing methods to boost the performance. Experimental results and analyses demonstrate that APDM can achieve competitive and effective performance on cross-scene classification tasks.