SAAN: Similarity-Aware Attention Flow Network for Change Detection With VHR Remote Sensing Images

Change detection (CD) is a fundamental and important task for monitoring the land surface dynamics in the earth observation field. Existing deep learning-based CD methods typically extract bi-temporal image features using a weight-sharing Siamese encoder network and identify change regions using a decoder network. These CD methods, however, still perform far from satisfactorily as we observe that 1) deep encoder layers focus on irrelevant background regions; and 2) the models’ confidence in the change regions is inconsistent at different decoder stages. The first problem is because deep encoder layers cannot effectively learn from imbalanced change categories using the sole output supervision, while the second problem is attributed to the lack of explicit semantic consistency preservation. To address these issues, we design a novel similarity-aware attention flow network (SAAN). SAAN incorporates a similarity-guided attention flow module with deeply supervised similarity optimization to achieve effective change detection. Specifically, we counter the first issue by explicitly guiding deep encoder layers to discover semantic relations from bi-temporal input images using deeply supervised similarity optimization. The extracted features are optimized to be semantically similar in the unchanged regions and dissimilar in the changing regions. The second drawback can be alleviated by the proposed similarity-guided attention flow module, which incorporates similarity-guided attention modules and attention flow mechanisms to guide the model to focus on discriminative channels and regions. We evaluated the effectiveness and generalization ability of the proposed method by conducting experiments on a wide range of CD tasks. The experimental results demonstrate that our method achieves excellent performance on several CD tasks, with discriminative features and semantic consistency preserved.