Automatic Fish Age Determination across Different Otolith Image Labs Using Domain Adaptation

Although Deep Convolutional Neural Network (DCNN) has been admittedly witnessed as an enormous success in a wide range of applications, most of them require sufficient annotations with time-consuming and labor-exhausting efforts. Existing domain adaptation (DA) approaches delve into designing an effective loss module to minimize the distribution gap between the source and target domains. However, few studies pay attention to improve the backbone or network architecture for DA issues. In this paper, we propose a new backbone for DA specially, i.e., Transferable ResNet (TransResNet). TransResNet remedies the residual block in ResNet, separating source and target input features and highlighting more transferable channels in each block. It can be easily applied to all kinds of DA methods, without adding any extra learning parameters. We conduct substantial experiments on two general DA datasets and embed TransResNet into two seminal DA methods, including DANN and CDAN. Experimental results demonstrate TransResNet improves the transferability of the architecture, indicating that it is a great substitute for ResNet as a network backbone in DA issues.

Remote sensing (RS) scene classification plays an important role in the field of earth observation. With the rapid development of the RS techniques, a large number of RS scene images are available. As manually labeling large-scale RS scene images is both labor and time consuming, when a new unlabeled data set is obtained, how to use the existing labeled data sets to classify the new unlabeled images is an important research direction. Different RS scene image data sets may be taken from different type of sensors, and the images may vary from imaging modalities, spatial resolutions, and image scales, so the distribution discrepancy exists among different image data sets. As a result, simply applying convolutional neural networks (CNN) trained on source domain cannot accurately classify the images on target domain. Domain adaptation (DA) can be helpful to solve this problem. In this letter, we design a subspace alignment (SA) and CNN-based framework to solve the DA problem in RS scene image classification. A new SA layer is proposed and added into CNN models for DA, which could align the source and target domains in some feature subspace. Fine-tuning the modified CNN model with the added SA layer makes the CNN model adapt to the aligned feature subspace and helps to relieve the domain distribution discrepancy. The experiments conducted on two public data sets show that adding the SA layer into CNN improves the scene classification on the target domain.

Machine learning (ML) is increasingly applied in optical network management, especially in cross-layer frameworks where physical layer characteristics may trigger changes at the network layer due to transmission performance measurements (quality of transmission, QoT) monitored by optical equipment. Leveraging ML-based QoT estimation approaches has proven to be a promising alternative to exploiting classical mathematical methods or transmission simulation tools. However, supervised ML models rely on large representative training sets, which are often unavailable, due to the lack of the necessary telemetry equipment or of historical data. In such cases, it can be useful to use training data collected from a different network. Unfortunately, the resulting models may be uneffective when applied to the current network, if the training data (the source domain) is not well representative of the network under study (the target domain). Domain adaptation (DA) techniques aim at tackling this issue, to make possible the transfer of knowledge among different networks. This paper compares several DA approaches applied to the problem of estimating the QoT of an optical lightpath using a supervised ML approach. Results show that, when the number of samples from the target domain is limited to a few dozen, DA approaches consistently outperform standard supervised ML techniques.

In many visual recognition tasks, the domain distribution mismatch between the training set (i.e., source domain) and the test set (i.e., target domain) may cause the performance of the classifier learnt from the training set to be significantly degraded on the test set. The solutions to address the domain distribution mismatch can be classified into Domain Adaptation (DA) and Domain Generalization (DG). Specifically, DA utilizes the unlabeled target domain data in the training phase to reduce the domain distribution mismatch while DG aims to learn the classifier on the source domain which can generalize well to any unseen target domain. This thesis focuses on DA and DG for visual recognition. Most of the existing DA and DG approaches require well labeled training data. Since collecting labeled data is often time consuming and expensive, some recent works utilize freely available web images/videos for visual recognition. Therefore, the DA and DG methods can be categorized based on learning from web data or well labeled data.

A unified framework for visual domain adaptation with covariance matching

In real-world hyperspectral image (HSI) classification, the limited annotated examples usually lead to the insufficiently trained classifier, which further generates low classification accuracy. To overcome this challenge, Domain Adaptation (DA) methods have been developed to transfer learnable knowledge from the external HSIs with sufficient labeled examples ( <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">i.e</i> ., the source domain) to the interested HSI with scarce labeled examples ( <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">i.e</i> ., the target domain). Conventional DA approaches often pseudo-label the examples with high classification confidence and then incorporate them in the training process. However, due to the significant domain gap, relying solely on the confident examples may not be adequate to achieve satisfactory performance. Therefore, this paper proposes an Interactive Easy-to-Hard Domain Adaptation method (IEH-DA) to arrange the adaptation process so that the “easy” examples are adapted ahead of the “hard” ones. In an early stage, the easy examples with high pseudo-labeling confidence are selected for the adversarial learning based DA. In a later stage, the “hard” examples with high informativity are further selected, and they are interactively labeled by human expert to provide accurate supervision information for adaptation. As a result, the examples in target domain are used in an easy-to-hard way, which forms a curriculum sequence for orderly model training. Extensive experiments conducted on typical public datasets demonstrate that IEH-DA outperforms other state-of-the-art DA methods for HSI classification.

In the absence of the labeled samples in a domain referred to as target domain, Domain Adaptation (DA) techniques come in handy. Generally, DA techniques assume there are available source domains that share similar predictive function with the target domain. Two core challenges of DA typically arise, variance that exists between source and target domains, and the inherent source hypothesis bias. In this paper, we first propose a Stability Transfer criterion for selecting relevant source domains with low variance. With this criterion, we introduce a TARget learning Assisted by Source Classifier Adaptation (TARASCA) method to address the two core challenges that have impeded the performances of DA techniques. To verify the robustness of TARASCA, extensive experimental studies are carried out with comparison to several state-of-the-art DA methods on the real-world Sentiment and Newsgroups datasets, where various settings for the class ratios of the source and target domains are considered.

This paper addresses the problem of land-cover map updating by classification of multitemporal remote-sensing images in the context of domain adaptation (DA). The basic assumptions behind the proposed approach are twofold. The first one is that training data (ground reference information) are available for one of the considered multitemporal acquisitions (source domain) whereas they are not for the other (target domain). The second one is that multitemporal acquisitions (i.e., target and source domains) may be characterized by different sets of classes. Unlike other approaches available in the literature, the proposed DA Bayesian classifier based on maximum a posteriori decision rule (DA-MAP) automatically identifies whether there exist differences between the set of classes in the target and source domains and properly handles these differences in the updating process. The proposed method was tested in different scenarios of increasing complexity related to multitemporal image classification. Experimental results on medium-resolution and very high resolution multitemporal remote-sensing data sets confirm the effectiveness and the reliability of the proposed DA-MAP classifier.

Building segmentation for remote sensing images usually requires pixel-level labels which is difficult to collect when the images are in low resolution and quality. Recently, weakly supervised semantic segmentation methods have achieved promising performance, which only rely on image-level labels for each image. However, buildings in remote sensing images tend to present regular structures. The lack of supervision information may result in the ambiguous boundaries. In this paper, we propose a new weakly supervised network for refined building segmentation by mining the cross-domain structure affinity (CDSA) from multi-source remote sensing images. CDSA integrates the ideas of weak supervision and domain adaptation, where a pixel-level labeled source domain and an image-level labeled target domain are required. The target of CDSA is to learn a powerful segmentation network on the target domain with the guidance of source domain data. CDSA mainly consists of two branches, the structure affinity module (SAM) and the spatial structure adaptation (SSA). In brief, SAM is developed to learn the structure affinity of the buildings from source domain, and SSA infuses the structure affinity to the target domain via a domain adaptation approach. Moreover, we design an end-to-end network structure to simultaneously optimize the SAM and SSA. In this case, SAM can receive pseudosupervised information from SSA, and in turn provide a more accurate affinity matrix for SSA. In the experiments, our model can achieve an IoU score at 57.87% and 79.57% for the WHU and Vaihingen data sets. We compare CDSA with several state-of-the-art weakly supervised and domain adaptation methods, and the results indicate that our method presents advantages on two public data sets.

Multisource unsupervised domain adaptation (MUDA) is an important and challenging topic for target classification with the assistance of labeled data in source domains. When we have several labeled source domains, it is difficult to map all source domains and target domain into a common feature space for classifying the targets well. In this article, a new progressive multisource domain adaptation network (PMSDAN) is proposed to further improve the classification performance. PMSDAN mainly consists of two steps for distribution alignment. First, the multiple source domains are integrated as one auxiliary domain to match the distribution with the target domain. By doing this, we can generally reduce the distribution discrepancy between each source and target domains, as well as the discrepancy between different source domains. It can efficiently explore useful knowledge from the integrated source domain. Second, to mine assistance knowledge from each source domain as much as possible, the distribution of the target domain is separately aligned with that of each source domain. A weighted fusion method is employed to combine the multiple classification results for making the final decision. In the optimization of domain adaption, weighted hybrid maximum mean discrepancy (WHMMD) is proposed, and it considers both the interclass and intraclass discrepancies. The effectiveness of the proposed PMSDAN is demonstrated in the experiments comparing with some state-of-the-art methods.

Recently, transfer learning, and especially domain adaptation (DA), has been introduced to the cross-scene remote sensing image scene classification task. The existing DA approaches for the remote sensing image built on the hypothesis that the source domain and target domain share identical category spaces. However, in a new region, novel categories may appear. Open-set domain adaptation (OSDA) methods is proposed to solve such problems. Existing OSDA methods need to determine the thresholds or other hyper-parameters (such as number of unknown sample) to detect novel classes. In this paper, an end-to-end open-set domain adaptation for cross scene classification (OSDA_CSC) framework is proposed to solve these problems. In this framework, to overcome the different feature distributions caused by the different class spaces and the feature discriminability decrease in the remote sensing OSDA scenario, we propose an unknown-class detector using a one-vs-all network considering class distances to find the unknown classes in the target domain. We also introduce target domain neighbourhood clustering loss to improve the target domain feature discriminability. The proposed method can improve cross-scene classification and automatically label the unknown class samples in the target domain.

Domain adaptation has achieved promising results in many areas, such as image classification and object recognition. Although a lot of algorithms have been proposed to solve the task with different domain distributions, it remains a challenge for multi-source unsupervised domain adaptation. In addition, most of the existing algorithms learn a classifier on the source domain and predict the labels for the target data, which indicates that only the knowledge derived from the hyperplane is transferred to the target domain and the structure information is ignored. In light of this, we propose a novel algorithm for multi-source unsupervised domain adaptation. Generally speaking, we aim to preserve the whole structure from source domains and transfer it to serve the task on the target domain. The source and target data are put together for clustering, which simultaneously explores the structures of the source and target domains. The structure-preserved information from source domain further guides the clustering process on the target domain. Extensive experiments on two widely used databases on object recognition and face identification show the substantial improvement of our proposed approach over several state-of-the-art methods. Especially, our algorithm can take use of multi-source domains and achieve robust and better performance compared with the single source domain adaptation methods.

Unsupervised domain adaptation aims to transfer knowledge from labeled source domain to unlabeled target domain. Recently, multisource domain adaptation (MDA) has begun to attract attention. Its performance should go beyond simply mixing all source domains together for knowledge transfer. In this article, we propose a novel prototype-based method for MDA. Specifically, for solving the problem that the target domain has no label, we use the prototype to transfer the semantic category information from source domains to target domain. First, a feature extraction network is applied to both source and target domains to obtain the extracted features from which the domain-invariant features and domain-specific features will be disentangled. Then, based on these two kinds of features, the named inherent class prototypes and domain prototypes are estimated, respectively. Then a prototype mapping to the extracted feature space is learned in the feature reconstruction process. Thus, the class prototypes for all source and target domains can be constructed in the extracted feature space based on the previous domain prototypes and inherent class prototypes. By forcing the extracted features are close to the corresponding class prototypes for all domains, the feature extraction network is progressively adjusted. In the end, the inherent class prototypes are used as a classifier in the target domain. Our contribution is that through the inherent class prototypes and domain prototypes, the semantic category information from source domains is transformed into the target domain by constructing the corresponding class prototypes. In our method, all source and target domains are aligned twice at the feature level for better domain-invariant features and more closer features to the class prototypes, respectively. Several experiments on public data sets also prove the effectiveness of our method.

Multi-target domain adaptation intelligent diagnosis method for rotating machinery based on multi-source attention mechanism and mixup feature augmentation

Domain adaptation has become an attractive learning paradigm, as it can leverage source domains with rich labels to deal with classification tasks in an unlabeled target domain. A few recent studies develop domain adaptation approaches for graph-structured data. In the case of node classification task, current domain adaptation methods only focus on the closed-set setting, where source and target domains share the same label space. A more practical assumption is that the target domain may contain new classes that are not included in the source domain. Therefore, in this paper, we introduce a novel and challenging problem for graphs, i.e., open-set domain adaptive node classification, and propose a new approach to solve it. Specifically, we develop an algorithm for efficient knowledge transfer from a labeled source graph to an unlabeled target graph under a separate domain alignment (SDA) strategy, in order to learn discriminative feature representations for the target graph. Our goal is to not only correctly classify target nodes into the known classes, but also classify unseen types of nodes into an unknown class. Experimental results on real-world datasets show that our method outperforms existing methods on graph domain adaptation.