ICSF: Integrating Inter-Modal and Cross-Modal Learning Framework for Self-Supervised Heterogeneous Change Detection

Heterogeneous change detection (HCD) is a process to determine the change information by analyzing heterogeneous images of the same geographic location taken at different times, which plays an important role in remote sensing applications such as disaster response and environmental monitoring. However, the different imaging mechanisms result in different visual appearances in heterogeneous images, making it difficult to accurately detect changes through direct comparison. To address this problem, we propose a novel self-supervised dual-branch framework (ICSF) for HCD that incorporates inter-modal and cross-modal learning. First, in the inter-modal branch, we perform the contrastive learning on heterogeneous images within their respective modalities to learn the robust and discriminative features, rather than relying on the raw spectral or spatial information from these images. Second, in the cross-modal branch, we perform cross-modal reconstruction to ensure the obtained features exhibit consistent comparability, thereby facilitating the extraction of rich information of the real changes within the images. Next, the difference images (DIs) computed from both branches are further refined using a superpixel segmentation strategy to preserve the consistency of differences within the same ground object. Experimental results on five public datasets with different modality combinations and change events demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach in comparison to ten state-of-the-art methods, achieving the best performance with an average overall accuracy of 95.88% and an average Kappa coefficient of 74.20%.