SAR Image Change Detection Based on Multiscale Capsule Network

Traditional synthetic-aperture radar (SAR) image change detection methods based on convolutional neural networks (CNNs) face the challenges of speckle noise and deformation sensitivity. To mitigate these issues, we proposed a multiscale capsule network (Ms-CapsNet) to extract the discriminative information between the changed and unchanged pixels. On the one hand, the multiscale capsule module is employed to exploit the spatial relationship of features. Therefore, equivariant properties can be achieved by aggregating the features from different positions. On the other hand, an adaptive fusion convolution (AFC) module is designed for the proposed Ms-CapsNet. The higher semantic features can be captured for the primary capsules. Feature extracted by the AFC module significantly improves the robustness to speckle noise. The effectiveness of the proposed Ms-CapsNet is verified on three real SAR data sets. The comparison experiments with four state-of-the-art methods demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed method. Our codes are available at https://github.com/summitgao/SAR_CD_MS_CapsNet.