Cross-domain landslide mapping from large-scale remote sensing images using prototype-guided domain-aware progressive representation learning

Landslide mapping via pixel-wise classification of remote sensing imagery is essential for hazard prevention and risk assessment. Deep-learning-based change detection greatly aids landslide mapping by identifying the down-slope movement of soil, rock and other materials from bitemporal images, benefiting from the feature representation capabilities of convolutional neural networks. However, these networks rely on large amounts of pixel-level annotated data to achieve their promising performance and they normally exhibit weak generalization capability on heterogeneous image data from unseen domains. To address these issues, we propose a prototype-guided domain-aware progressive representation learning (PG-DPRL) method for cross-domain landslide mapping from large-scale remote sensing images based on the multitarget domain adaptation (MTDA) technique. PG-DPRL attempts to learn a shared landslide mapping network that performs well in multiple target domains with no additional effort for sample annotation. Specifically, PG-DPRL adopts a near-to-far adaptation strategy to gradually align the representation distributions of all target domains with the source domain, considering discrepancies between them. On this basis, cross-domain prototype learning is exploited to generate reliable domain-specific pseudo-labels and aggregate representations across domains to learn a shared decision boundary. In each DPRL step, the prototype-guided adversarial learning (PGAL) algorithm is performed to achieve category-wise representation alignment and improve the discriminative capability of representations by introducing the Wasserstein distance metric and cross-domain prototype consistency (CPC) loss. Experiments on a global very-high-resolution landslide mapping (GVLM) dataset consisting of 17 heterogeneous domains from different landslide sites demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness of PG-DPRL. It considerably improves the transferability of landslide mapping networks and outperforms several state-of-the-art approaches in terms of total and average accuracy metrics among all target domains.