ADAC: an active domain adaptive network with progressive learning strategy for cloud detection of remote sensing imagery

To enhance the adaptability and application capability of the cloud detection model in different remote sensing satellite domains, unsupervised domain adaptation methods are employed to improve the model’s robustness and transferability. However, conducting fully unlabeled training in the target domain to be adapted may impose difficulty on further improving the accuracy. It is more practical to obtain a few labeled target data for domain adaptation. Additionally, the detection of complex cloud scenes remains a persistent challenge. To address these issues, an Active Domain Adaptation network for Cloud detection (ADAC) is proposed in this paper. This network employs active learning to select a small number of representative samples for annotation, facilitating the transfer of a source domain-trained model to the target domain. Moreover, a novel Generator (G) designed for cloud segmentation is developed, where G utilizes a progressive learning strategy by dividing the network into two stages to learn gradient information, guiding cloud boundary segmentation and enabling the distinction between cloud-like objects and clouds. Furthermore, G integrates Transformer and Convolutional Neural Network to address the issues of misclassifying thin clouds. The proposed method is validated on Landsat 8 and GF-2 datasets, representing the source and target domains, respectively. The experimental results demonstrate ADAC achieved a 4% improvement in the overall accuracy with only 5% labeled training samples in the target domain, achieving the effective adaptation performance in the GF-2 domain.