ER-PASS: Experience Replay with Performance-Aware Submodular Sampling for Domain-Incremental Learning in Remote Sensing

In recent years, deep learning has become a dominant research trend in the field of remote sensing. However, due to significant domain discrepancies among datasets collected from various platforms, models trained on a single domain often struggle to generalize to other domains. In domain-incremental learning scenarios, such discrepancies often lead to catastrophic forgetting, hindering the practical deployment of deep learning models. To address this challenge, we propose ER-PASS, an experience replay-based continual learning algorithm that incorporates a performance-aware submodular sampling strategy. ER-PASS effectively balances adaptability across domains and retention of knowledge by integrating the strengths of joint learning and experience replay, while maintaining practical efficiency in terms of training time and memory usage. Additionally, by leveraging a performance-aware sample selection strategy that integrates submodular gain and task-specific evaluation scores, ER-PASS enables robust and stable learning. Experimental results on two distinct applications—building segmentation and land use/land cover (LULC) classification—demonstrate that ER-PASS outperforms existing continual learning methods in mitigating forgetting and generalizing across diverse application scenarios. Moreover, experiments conducted on both UNet and DeepLabV3+ validate the model-agnostic nature of ER-PASS, underscoring its potential as a practical and general-purpose solution for continual learning in remote sensing.