DILRS: Domain-Incremental Learning for Semantic Segmentation in Multi-Source Remote Sensing Data

With the exponential growth in the speed and volume of remote sensing data, deep learning models are expected to adapt and continually learn over time. Unfortunately, the domain shift between multi-source remote sensing data from various sensors and regions poses a significant challenge. Segmentation models face difficulty in adapting to incremental domains due to catastrophic forgetting, which can be addressed via incremental learning methods. However, current incremental learning methods mainly focus on class-incremental learning, wherein classes belong to the same remote sensing domain, and neglect investigations into incremental domains in remote sensing. To solve this problem, we propose a domain-incremental learning method for semantic segmentation in multi-source remote sensing data. Specifically, our model aims to incrementally learn a new domain while preserving its performance on previous domains without accessing previous domain data. To achieve this, our model has a unique parameter learning structure that reparametrizes domain-agnostic and domain-specific parameters. We use different optimization strategies to adapt to domain shift in incremental domain learning. Additionally, we adopt multi-level knowledge distillation loss to mitigate the impact of label space shift among domains. The experiments demonstrate that our method achieves excellent performance in domain-incremental settings, outperforming existing methods with only a few parameters.