Transfer component analysis for domain adaptation in image classification

This contribution studies a feature extraction technique aiming at reducing differences between domains in image classification. The purpose is to find a common feature space between labeled samples issued from a source image and test samples belonging to a related target image. The presented approach, Transfer Component Analysis, finds a transformation matrix performing a joint mapping of the two domains by minimizing a probability distribution distance measure, the Maximum Mean Discrepancy criterion. When predicting on a target image, such a projection allows to apply a supervised classifier trained exclusively on labeled source pixels mapped in this common latent subspace. Promising results are observed on a urban scene captured by a hyperspectral image. The experiments reveal improvements with respect to a standard classification model built on the original source image and other feature extraction techniques.