Learning the roots of visual domain shift

In this paper we focus on the spatial nature of visual domain shift, attempting to learn where domain adaptation originates in each given image of the source and target set. We borrow concepts and techniques from the CNN visualization literature, and learn domainness maps able to localize the degree of domain specificity in images.We derive from these maps features related to different domainness levels, and we show that by considering them as a preprocessing step for a domain adaptation algorithm, the final classification performance is strongly improved. Combined with the whole image representation, these features provide state of the art results on the Office dataset. © Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2016.