Adaptive Spatial and Difference Learning for Change Detection

Change detection refers to revealing the surface changes from multitemporal images of a given scene, where changed regions of different size and shape may appear anywhere. Convolutional neural network, as one of the most widely used deep learning architectures, has shown good performance in change detection task recently. However, due to multiple convolution and pooling operators in deep architectures, it often happens that small changes are missed and sharp edges are blurred. In this article, an adaptive spatial and difference learning method is proposed to tackle this problem, which mainly contains a feature-adapted difference learning (FADL) module and a difference recalibration (DR) module. In FADL, a kernel-adapted spatial learning part is constructed to capture varying spatial information, which selects proper kernels to adapt different shape and size of changed regions; a joint feature refinement part is employed to learn comprehensive features between bitemporal data, which are further enhanced by difference information. In addition, DR with shallow features is designed to recalibrate spatial and difference details further. From the experiments on three public datasets, our proposed method can relieve the spatial ambiguity problem and obtains the optimal results among the compared change detection methods.