Depth-Aware Adversarial Domain Adaptation for Cross-Domain Remote Sensing Segmentation

As a key task in remote sensing analysis, semantic segmentation of remote sensing images (RSI) underpins many practical applications. Despite its importance, obtaining dense pixel-wise annotations remains labor-intensive and time-consuming. Unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) offers a promising solution by utilizing knowledge from labeled source domains for unlabeled target domains, yet its effectiveness is often compromised by significant distribution shifts arising from variations in imaging conditions. To address this challenge, we propose a depth-aware adaptation network (DAAN), a novel two-branch network that explicitly leverages complementary depth information from a digital surface model (DSM) to enhance cross-domain remote sensing segmentation. Unlike conventional UDA methods that primarily focus on semantic features, DAAN incorporates depth data to build a more generalized feature space. This network introduces three key components: an adaptive feature aggregator (AFA) for progressive semantic-depth feature fusion, a gated prediction selection unit (GPSU) that selectively integrates predictions to mitigate the impact of noisy depth measurements, and misalignment-focused residual refinement (MFRR) module that emphasizes poorly aligned target regions during training. Experiments on the ISPRS and GAMUS datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method. In particular, DAAN achieves an mIoU of 50.53% and an F1 score of 65.75% for cross-domain segmentation on ISPRS to GAMUS, outperforming models without depth information by 9.17% and 8.99%, respectively. These results demonstrate the advantage of integrating auxiliary geometric information to improve model generalization on unlabeled remote sensing datasets, contributing to higher mapping accuracy, more reliable automated analysis, and enhanced decision-making support.