Deep Domain Adaptation in Earth Observation

When applied to new datasets, acquired at different time moments, with different sensors or under different acquisition conditions, deep learning models might fail spectacularly. This is because they have learned from the data distribution observed during training and, as such, do not generalize out of that domain naturally. This chapter introduces methodologies designed to tackle this problem and provide deep learning models able to adapt to new data distributions, i.e. domain adaptation. Domain adaptation works by either adapting the representation to the new data distribution, modifying the inputs or performing smart sampling. But independently of the strategy, they lead to updated models, able to process effectively the new data without needing observation from it (or a very limited amount).