A disparity‐aware Siamese network for building change detection in bi‐temporal remote sensing images

Abstract Building change detection has various applications, such as urban management and disaster assessment. Along with the exponential growth of remote sensing data and computing power, an increasing number of deep‐learning‐based remote sensing building change detection methods have been proposed in recent years. Objectively, the overwhelming majority of existing methods can perfectly deal with the change detection of low‐rise buildings. By contrast, high‐rise buildings often present a large disparity in multitemporal high‐resolution remote sensing images, which degrades the performance of existing methods dramatically. To alleviate this problem, we propose a disparity‐aware Siamese network for detecting building changes in bi‐temporal high‐resolution remote sensing images. The proposed network utilises a cycle‐alignment module to address the disparity problem at both the image and feature levels. A multi‐task learning framework with joint semantic segmentation and change detection loss is used to train the entire deep network, including the cycle‐alignment module in an end‐to‐end manner. Extensive experiments on three publicly open building change detection datasets demonstrate that our method achieves significant improvements on datasets with severe building disparity and state‐of‐the‐art performance on datasets with minimal building disparity simultaneously.