AdaSemiCD: An Adaptive Semi-Supervised Change Detection Method Based on Pseudo-Label Evaluation

Change detection (CD) is an essential field in remote sensing, with a primary focus on identifying areas of change in bitemporal image pairs captured at varying intervals of the same region. The data annotation process for CD tasks is both time-consuming and labor-intensive. To better utilize the scarce labeled data and abundant unlabeled data, we introduce an adaptive semi-supervised learning (SSL) method, AdaSemiCD, to improve pseudo-label usage and optimize the training process. Initially, due to the extreme class imbalance inherent in CD, the model is more inclined to focus on the background class, and it is easy to confuse the boundary of the target object. Considering these two points, we develop a measurable evaluation metric for pseudo-labels that enhances the representation of information entropy by class rebalancing and amplification of ambiguous areas, assigning greater weights to prospective change objects. Subsequently, to enhance the reliability of sample wise pseudo-labels, we introduce the AdaFusion module, to dynamically identify the most uncertain region and substitute it with more trustworthy content. Lastly, to ensure better training stability, we introduce the AdaEMA module, which updates the teacher model using only batches of trusted samples. Experimental results on ten public CD datasets validate the efficacy and generalizability of our proposed adaptive training framework.