Deep Siamese Networks Based Change Detection with Remote Sensing Images

Although considerable success has been achieved in change detection on optical remote sensing images, accurate detection of specific changes is still challenging. Due to the diversity and complexity of the ground surface changes and the increasing demand for detecting changes that require high-level semantics, we have to resort to deep learning techniques to extract the intrinsic representations of changed areas. However, one key problem for developing deep learning metho for detecting specific change areas is the limitation of annotated data. In this paper, we collect a change detection dataset with 862 labeled image pairs, where the urban construction-related changes are labeled. Further, we propose a supervised change detection method based on a deep siamese semantic segmentation network to handle the proposed data effectively. The novelty of the method is that the proposed siamese network treats the change detection problem as a binary semantic segmentation task and learns to extract features from the image pairs directly. The siamese architecture as well as the elaborately designed semantic segmentation networks significantly improve the performance on change detection tasks. Experimental results demonstrate the promising performance of the proposed network compared to existing approaches.