Confident Learning-Based Domain Adaptation for Hyperspectral Image Classification

Cross-domain hyperspectral image classification is one of the major challenges in remote sensing, especially for target domain data without labels. Recently, deep learning approaches have demonstrated effectiveness in domain adaptation. However, most of them leverage unlabeled target data only from a statistical perspective but neglect the analysis at the instance level. For better statistical alignment, existing approaches employ the entire unevaluated target data in an unsupervised manner, which may introduce noise and limit the discriminability of the neural networks. In this article, we propose confident learning-based domain adaptation (CLDA) to address the problem from a new perspective of data manipulation. To this end, a novel framework is presented to combine domain adaptation with confident learning (CL), where the former reduces the interdomain discrepancy and generates pseudo-labels for the target instances, from which the latter selects high-confidence target samples. Specifically, the confident learning part evaluates the confidence of each pseudo-labeled target sample based on the assigned labels and the predicted probabilities. Then, high-confidence target samples are selected as training data to increase the discriminative capacity of the neural networks. In addition, the domain adaptation part and the confident learning part are trained alternately to progressively increase the proportion of high-confidence labels in the target domain, thus further improving the accuracy of classification. Experimental results on four datasets demonstrate that the proposed CLDA method outperforms the state-of-the-art domain adaptation approaches. Our source code is available at http://github.com/Li-ZK/CLDA-2022.