Approximate geometric structure transfer for cross-domain image classification

The main purpose of domain adaptation (DA) is to conduct cross-domain related knowledge transfer. Considering the issue of unsupervised DA (UDA), learning a transformation that reduces the differences between domains is the primary goal. In addition to minimizing both the marginal and conditional distributions between the source and target domains, many methods explore potential factors that show the commonalities among domains to yield improved learning efficiency. However, geometric structure information is overlooked by most existing approaches, indicating that the shared information between domains has not been fully exploited. On account of this finding, by taking advantage of more potential shared factors to further enhance the results of DA, we propose an approximate geometric structure transfer (AGST) method for cross-domain image classification in this paper. By combining structural consistency and sample reweighting techniques, AGST encodes the geometric structure information taken from the samples in both domains, enabling it to easily obtain richer interdomain features and effectively facilitate knowledge transfer. Extensive experiments are conducted on several cross-domain data benchmarks. The experimental results indicate that our AGST method can outperform many state-of-the-art algorithms.