TY - JOUR
T1 - DFANet
T2 - Prototype-driven dynamic feature alignment for natural-to-remote-sensing cross-domain few-shot semantic segmentation
AU - Zhang, Xiaogang
AU - Fan, Wei
AU - Wang, Yupei
AU - Chen, Liang
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2026 Elsevier B.V.
PY - 2026/9
Y1 - 2026/9
N2 - Cross-domain few-shot semantic segmentation (CD-FSS) aims to segment novel classes under limited supervision and domain shifts. In this work, we focus on a more challenging yet practically important subtask, namely natural-to-remote-sensing CD-FSS, where knowledge learned from natural-scene data is transferred to diverse remote sensing target domains. Compared with generic unseen-domain transfer, this setting is particularly challenging due to the complex background structures, large scale variations, and substantial imaging discrepancies in remote sensing imagery, which make accurate segmentation in such scenarios difficult. To address these issues, we propose DFANet, a unified framework tailored for natural-to-remote-sensing CD-FSS. We first design a multi-dimensional prototype reconstruction (MPR) module, which refines class prototypes through query-guided attention to enhance prototype discriminability under complex scene structures and ambiguous foreground-background boundaries. We then introduce a dynamic feature alignment (DFA) module to align support and query features from both local spatial structures and global channel statistics, thereby alleviating cross-scene feature mismatches caused by large scale variations and appearance differences. Furthermore, we develop a test-time anchored support finetuning (TASF) strategy, which performs lightweight target-domain adaptation using a few annotated support samples as anchors to further reduce the residual domain discrepancy. On three representative remote sensing datasets, including Deepglobe, Vaihingen, and Potsdam, DFANet achieves average MIoU scores of 40.24%, 47.07%, and 48.95% under 1-shot, 5-shot and 10-shot settings, respectively, outperforming existing CD-FSS methods for natural-to-remote-sensing evaluation. Code is publicly available at https://github.com/zhangxiaogang-111/DFANet .
AB - Cross-domain few-shot semantic segmentation (CD-FSS) aims to segment novel classes under limited supervision and domain shifts. In this work, we focus on a more challenging yet practically important subtask, namely natural-to-remote-sensing CD-FSS, where knowledge learned from natural-scene data is transferred to diverse remote sensing target domains. Compared with generic unseen-domain transfer, this setting is particularly challenging due to the complex background structures, large scale variations, and substantial imaging discrepancies in remote sensing imagery, which make accurate segmentation in such scenarios difficult. To address these issues, we propose DFANet, a unified framework tailored for natural-to-remote-sensing CD-FSS. We first design a multi-dimensional prototype reconstruction (MPR) module, which refines class prototypes through query-guided attention to enhance prototype discriminability under complex scene structures and ambiguous foreground-background boundaries. We then introduce a dynamic feature alignment (DFA) module to align support and query features from both local spatial structures and global channel statistics, thereby alleviating cross-scene feature mismatches caused by large scale variations and appearance differences. Furthermore, we develop a test-time anchored support finetuning (TASF) strategy, which performs lightweight target-domain adaptation using a few annotated support samples as anchors to further reduce the residual domain discrepancy. On three representative remote sensing datasets, including Deepglobe, Vaihingen, and Potsdam, DFANet achieves average MIoU scores of 40.24%, 47.07%, and 48.95% under 1-shot, 5-shot and 10-shot settings, respectively, outperforming existing CD-FSS methods for natural-to-remote-sensing evaluation. Code is publicly available at https://github.com/zhangxiaogang-111/DFANet .
KW - CD-FSS
KW - Feature alignment
KW - Prototype reconstruction
KW - Remote sensing
KW - Test-time finetuning
UR - https://www.scopus.com/pages/publications/105044301561
U2 - 10.1016/j.patrec.2026.06.026
DO - 10.1016/j.patrec.2026.06.026
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:105044301561
SN - 0167-8655
VL - 207
SP - 241
EP - 246
JO - Pattern Recognition Letters
JF - Pattern Recognition Letters
ER -