Dual Domain Control via Active Learning for Remote Sensing Domain Incremental Object Detection

Domain incremental object detection in remote sensing addresses the challenge of adapting to continuously emerging domains with distinct characteristics. Unlike natural images, remote sensing data vary significantly due to differences in sensors, altitudes, and geographic locations, leading to data distribution shifts and feature misalignments. These challenges make it difficult for models to generalize across domains while retaining knowledge from previous tasks, requiring effective adaptation strategies to mitigate catastrophic forgetting. To address these challenges, we propose the Dual Domain Control via Active Learning (Active-DDC) method, which integrates active learning strategies to handle data distribution and model feature shifts. The first component, the Data-based Active Learning Example Replay (ALER) module, combines a high-information sample selection strategy from active learning with the characteristic extreme foreground-background ratio in remote sensing images, enabling the selection of highly representative samples for storage in a memory bank. The second component, the Query-based Active Domain Shift Control (ADSC) module, leverages the query vector, a key element for DETR-based detectors, to implement query active preselection and optimal transport matching, thus facilitating effective cross-domain knowledge transfer. Our method achieves optimal performance in domain incremental tasks across four remote sensing datasets, and ablation studies further validate the effectiveness of both components.